


Peter Parker vs. Bert Achong, Anthony Epstein, and Yvonne Barr

by WhimsicalEthnographies



Series: Up Came the Sun [30]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)
Genre: Gen, May Parker is amazing, Not Medically Accurate, Peter Parker Needs a Hug, Sensory Overload, Some Whump, Tony Stark Acting as Peter Parker's Parental Figure, how accurate can it be he has spider DNA, if you can't guess by the title it's ridiculous, mild self-limiting illness, nothing too serious, there is a nightmare sequence with WORSE CASE SCENARIO in Chapter 2 so fair thee warned
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-30
Updated: 2020-06-30
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:02:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 27,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24991240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WhimsicalEthnographies/pseuds/WhimsicalEthnographies
Summary: A teenage rite of passage and Spider-DNA
Relationships: May Parker (Spider-Man) & Peter Parker, Michelle Jones/Peter Parker, Peter Parker & Everyone, Peter Parker & Tony Stark, Popeye's chicken sandwich
Series: Up Came the Sun [30]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1097577
Comments: 44
Kudos: 164





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So, the series update as of 6/29/2020: so my muse found me again, for some reason, and I had a burning desire to finish at least one story that was already 90% complete when I shut down. I mean, it's 2020, so we really can't say this is that surprising, right? I mean, it's pretty fucked, right? And those murder wasps are definitely coming back. Classic Chekov's gun. I've unmarked this series as complete, because who the fuck knows what's going to happen? No promises but ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
> 
> And I made shit up. Like, a lot of shit, with real life terms and laboratory tests but still, made shit up.
> 
> The entire thing switches back and forth between Peter’s and Tony’s POV
> 
> If you don't mind a blog that consists of shitposting, misunderstanding the memes all the kids talk about today, Johnlock conspiracies, and occasional MCU screaming follow me on the tumblr dot com [whimsicalethnographies](http://whimsicalethnographies.tumblr.com/)

When Peter was seven years old, he slipped and fell in the bathtub and broke his wrist. Uncle Ben and Aunt May did not have the rubbery fish that stuck to the bottom of the tub that were grippy and kept him from slipping like his parents’ tub did, and after two and a half years of living in their apartment, it finally caught up with them.

That night Peter got a red and gold cast with an Iron Man sticker, and Uncle Ben bought a non-slip tub mat from the Target on Queens Boulevard.

Slipping isn’t much of an issue any more, not on ice, or wet floors, or in the bathtub. But when Peter turns off the water and turns to grab his towel off the bar on the wall, his foot catches on the wet porcelain. He yelps, surprised, because after three years he’s pretty much figured out this sticking thing.

“Peter?” May calls from outside the bathroom. “You ok?”

“Yeah, May,” he lifts his foot, pulling it off the porcelain. “Just stubbed my toe?”

“You don’t sound too sure!”

“Just too early!” Peter grabs the towel and wraps it around himself, stepping out of the tub. He lets himself stick the floor, then focuses in a way that’s become second nature and takes a step, then another, over to the sink. No problem.

“That’s because you were past curfew last night, young man,” May’s voice drifts through the door and Peter rolls his eyes. He was only twenty minutes late. “Don’t think I didn’t text Tony about it!”

“Oh come on,” Peter mumbles under his breath. Mr. Stark and Pepper have been away for two weeks, on _one last hurrah_ , as Mr. Stark described it, before Pepper had the baby. She’d called it a _babymoon_ , which made everyone around the dinner table roll their eyes. They’d gone to some private resort in Arizona with beautiful views and mild temperatures, and almost every morning Peter would wake up to pictures of a cougar family that lurked on a ridge in the early morning. The pictures were from Pepper, quickly followed by rants from Mr. Stark about how there was a freaking mountain lion stalking his wife on vacation.

But they’d be back tonight, and they’ll be having dinner at the Tower tomorrow, and Peter is not looking forward to a lecture.

“You know the rules,” May calls, and Peter jumps; he was sure he’d said it too low for her to hear through the door. “Now hurry up, you have to eat before leaving.”

*****

The bell rings and Peter nearly falls out of his desk chair with the way it seems to split his skull. He’d always hated the bell, even before he was bitten, but for some reason it seems worse today, decibels louder than what he’d finally gotten used to. He used to have sensory-overdrive days fairly regularly, at least once a week in the beginning. Now they’re pretty few and far between, to the point that it’s started to surprise him when something drills directly into his skull. His fingertips catch the bottom of the desk--bumping into a piece of dried gum, gross--keeping him from toppling over. MJ looks over with one eyebrow raised as she closes her book and stands.

“You ok, loser?” She asks in that way that makes Peter’s cheeks burn, standing over him.

“Yeah,” he shakes his head a bit, trying to clear the loud ringing still bouncing around the inside of his skull. “Just wasn’t expecting the bell.”

“Your super anxiety didn’t warn you?” MJ smirks down at him.

“You know it doesn’t work that way, ‘Em,” Peter forces a smile, despite the fact that his ears are still ringing. 

“Oh, I forgot, you--” she makes finger quotes-- “ _feel safe with me_.” She says it like it’s the most ridiculous thing in the world, but her eyes soften as she watches Peter stand up from his desk.

His fingers catch again on the top, somehow, and Peter frowns. His index finger is stuck tight.

“Peter? You ok?” Concern bleeds into MJ’s voice, and before Peter can stop her, she reaches out to grab his wrist. His finger immediately releases.

“Yeah, yeah,” Peter shakes his hand a bit--it feels fine--and smiles at her. “I think that alarm just really jarred me.”

“Yeah, they’re pretty inhumane,” her face morphs back into its usual nonchalance. “Like a cattle call.”

“Yeah,” Peter huffs a polite laugh, and looks at the pads of his fingers, as if he’d be able to see anything. “I guess at least it’s not a bugle.”

“Might be better,” MJ shrugs. “Less shrill.”

“Mmmm.” Peter grabs his books and they start to file out of the classroom. His ears are still ringing a bit. “Oh, hey, I completely forgot: Mr. Stark is coming back and we’re doing a big dinner tomorrow. You wanna come?”

“Mmmm, pass,” MJ snorts. They reach her locker. “I know you and Ned still come in your pants when all the _Avengers_ \--” she makes a face-- “are together, but they’re mostly insufferable. And then I have to tell you guys to close your damn mouths all night.”

“Well, um,” Peter starts, the back of his neck feeling hot. “I was really only inviting you…”

“Oh,” MJ looks at him and draws herself up to her full height. Peter’s grown a bit more the past year, but she’s still got at least an inch on him. She smiles. “Then why don’t you ask me for tacos on Sunday instead, because I’d still be telling you to close your damn mouth all night.”

“Oh, o-okay,” Peter’s neck gets hotter, if possible. “Want to get tacos on Sunday?”

“Yes,” MJ chirps. “We can go to Taste of Tacos and sneak them into the movies.”

“Um, okay…”

“Don’t give me that look, Parker...think of it as fighting against a corporate monopoly intent on milking the poor masses for all their worth.”

“Oh, um, okay,” Peter nods, and crosses his arms. He makes to lean against the lockers, but apparently misjudges, because the fall is further than he expected and he nearly topples over.

MJ laughs. “Smooth.”

Peter forces a laugh and straightens, reaching out for the wall of lockers. That shouldn’t have happened. “You know,” he runs a hand through his hair. His scalp feels prickly and almost uneven. “Gotta keep up appearances lest everyone get suspicious.”

“Right,” MJ smiles and shuts her locker, throwing her bag over her shoulder. “Come get me at noon. And maybe get some sleep, Peter.”

“Yeah, yeah, ok,” Peter nods and shoves his hands in his pockets. “See you Sunday.”

********

“Ugh,” Peter groans, grimacing as May slams the fridge door shut. “Jeez.”

“What was that, honey?” May sets a pan of what he thinks is an attempt at vegan enchiladas on the counter. The aluminum scraps against the corian and sends twitches down Peter’s spine. 

“Nothing,” he turns off the faucet and shakes his hands off, then reaches for the towel. It feels like sandpaper against his hands. “Just loud.”

May frowns and comes up behind him. “Peter,” she reaches up, and gently probes the side of his neck.

“Ow!” He yelps, darting out of her reach into the corner of the kitchen. “May!” He reaches up and pokes where she’d touched. It’s swollen, and hurts. “Oooh…”

“Yeah,” May comes over, and reaches up to touch his neck again. “I think you have a swollen node.” She presses gently again, sending waves of pain down Peter’s neck. “Are you feeling okay?”

“Yes,” Peter watches her hand come up to his forehead, presumably to check his temperature. “Why?”

“Because you have a swollen lymph node, smart ass,” satisfied with how warm he feels, May reaches with both hands and pokes under his chin, feeling for something. “No pains, or chills?”

“Nothing out of the usual,” Peter flinches when she pokes into the swelling on the side of his neck again. “I did get hit a few times, last night…”

“That could be it...trauma can irritate them…”

“I’d hardly call it ‘trauma,’ May.”

“I most certainly would call it ‘trauma,’ Peter,” May leans back and looks at him, hands on her hips. “Tell me the truth?”

“I’m okay…”

“Peter,” May looks at him over her glasses. “We talked about this, after your little hibernation incident.” 

_They_ hadn’t so much talked about it, as May and Mr. Stark stood over him and did a poorly rehearsed good-cop-bad-cop routine about how if Peter was feeling even the slightly bit off he had to tell them, specifically and immediately.

“I feel fine, May,” Peter insists. He mostly does, sticking issues notwithstanding. “Bit of a headache, but I think it’s just because the sun has been out so much more. You know,” he gestures to his face. “Senses. It’s bright.”

“Well, I hope you’re not looking at it,” she swats his arm, then reaches up to his neck again. 

“I’m not. I think it’s just setting everything off. The bells in school were awful today. You know how sometimes sounds get weird.”

“Okay.” May takes his chin and turns his head, looking to see if there are any more visible bumps on his neck. “But you better tell me if anything else feels off. And if this doesn’t go down by next week, we’re gonna call Dr. Banner.”

“Fine.”

“Isn’t Ned sick?” May switches to poking under his arms, and Peter wriggles away.

“Yeah, he’s been out all week. He said they’re going to urgent care tomorrow if he’s not feeling better.”

“Huh,” she leans on the counter, one hand on her hip. “What’s he feeling like?”

“I dunno,” Peter tosses the towel on the counter. “He just said he feels gross and tired.”

“Any weird bumps in your groin?”

“No, May! Oh my god!” Peter twists further into the corning, instinctively shielding himself. A glint of sunlight off the oven handles catches him in the eye and he flinches. He hates when this happens, but it has happened. Mr. Stark even bought him black-out curtains and sound-proof headphones for when it’s too much, but it’s not there yet. 

“Maybe you shouldn’t go out tonight.”

“May, I’m _fine._ See?” Peter jumps up to the ceiling to prove his point. “See?”

“Fine,” May crosses her arms. “But if you’re so much as a second past one, you won’t be going out for two weeks. You understand?”

“Yes,” Peter groans and rolls his eyes. “I’ll be back by midnight.”

“I’m holding you to that. Now get off my ceiling, or I’m getting the broom,” she lifts one eyebrow, then turns on her heel and heads down the hall to her bedroom.

“Yes, May,” Peter mumbles, nimbly dropping from the ceiling. He doesn’t notice the piece of paint that stripped off and remained stuck to his finger until he goes to wash his hands later.

*********

“Tony, calm down. You’re going to vibrate this plane right out of the sky,” Pepper reaches over and presses a stern hand into Tony’s knee, which is bouncing up and down rather violently. “And I don’t remember you ever being this excited to see me.”

“Oh, I was... _am_ ,” Tony smiles and lays his hand over Pepper’s, twisting the rings on her finger. “But the kid is a moron. It’s easier to pretend to be calm when it’s you.”

“Right,” Pepper rolls her eyes, turning her hand over so she can wind her fingers with his.

The jet is slowing as it approaches Manhattan, and an invisible weight lifts off Tony’s shoulders when he sees the open hangar of the tower as the plane banks to maneuver into the city. The two weeks passed quickly, and aside from the cougar that stalked them, it was a good, relaxing trip. Pepper is positively glowing beside him.

And Peter, the selfless little shit he is, made him promise not to contact him unless he saw a particularly cute animal, with a promise in return that he’d let him turn Karen’s full-reporting protocols back on and that he’d be back in his bedroom no later than 11pm every night (1am on Fridays). The kid was keeping his end of the bargain, because aside from cougar-pictures from Pepper and Tony jumping in the thread to complain, they hadn’t spoken.

Tony _hates_ it. It feels weird, and wrong. They haven’t gone more than a day without a check-in since they brought everyone back. Several times Pepper had admonished him, _just call him, Tony. Everyone knows you’re incapable of doing anything but worrying about Peter, we all think it’s cute, and May has half-a-mind to just file the damn paperwork so you can take full financial liability too_ , but Tony was a grown-up on his last vacation before his wife had a baby, and he could do it, dammit. But now that they’re almost home, more than anything Tony wants to find the dumb kid who burrowed into his heart like an adorable little roundworm.

“You know you just said that out loud?” Pepper interrupts his thoughts just as the jet touches down.

“Huh?”

“You just called Peter a roundworm. I’m not sure he’d appreciate that.”

“Oh, I’ve said it to his face,” Tony shrugs, quickly unclicking his seatbelt--Pepper insists he wear it when she’s in a plane with him--and ignoring the twinge in his knee when he stands up. He’s going to need a scope, and soon. They only have three months left. “Besides, it’s true. He’s like a parasite.”

“Mmmm,” Pepper lets Tony lead her down the ramp of the plane. The cool, crisp March air feels nice. “And I’m sure he’s also fine, you haven’t heard a word from Karen or May, aside from him being late last night. And as much as you pretend otherwise, he is quite smart. I’d argue smarter than you.”

“With half of my sense of self-preservation, which is an accomplishment,” Tony turns to face her, leaning in to press a soft kiss to her lips. “Well, it was fun, Mrs. Stark--”

“Potts.”

“--so let’s do it again sometime,” Tony kisses her again and briefly rubs her belly, then steps back a few feet and double-taps the housing unit in his chest.

“Really?” Pepper laughs earnestly as the nanotech surrounds Tony. “You can’t wait until tomorrow?”

“Eh, he’ll be almost done with his patrol. I’m gonna surprise him. Maybe we can tag-team it and save a cat from a tree.”

“You be home before midnight! You just got back from vacation!”

“Yeah, yeah,” Tony blows her an exaggerated kiss. “I’ll put the baby to bed and be right home!” He blasts off, waving once more as Pepper laughs again and turns to walk into the tower, before shooting off towards Queens.

It doesn’t take him long to find Peter--the tracker will never come out of the suit, even if he mostly turns it off outside of emergency situations and two-week-long vacations--but he is surprised by _where_ he finds him, considering there’s still almost two hours until curfew.

“Hey, bud, need a hand?” Tony routes FRIDAY into Karen as soon as the kid is in view, pulling himself up a fire escape on the side of his apartment building. It’s a good thing he waited until he was nearly directly behind him, because the kid squeaks in surprise and slips off the metal bar, right into the metal arms of Iron Man.

“Mr. Stark!”

“Jeez, how deep in thought were you? You didn’t hear me?” Tony tightens his grip and looks around to make sure there aren’t pedestrians lingering in the street, before shooting up and around the side of the building to Peter’s bedroom window.

“S-sorry, Mr. Stark. I was thinking about equations,” Peter sounds breathless when he tilts his head up to look at Tony.

“Equations?” They reach Peter’s fire escape, and Tony unceremoniously drops him on it, landing next to him with a shuddering *clang.* Peter stumbles a bit but quickly rights himself and reaches for the window. “It’s Friday. You really are a nerd.”

“Shut up, Mr. Stark,” Peter clambers into his bedroom, then pushes the window open as far as it will go to let Tony in.

“Yeah, kiddo, I think I’ll go around the front. It hurts to bend over to wash my feet,” Tony jets off the fire escape before Peter can answer, and drops down to the deserted alley between buildings. Three minutes later he has removed the suit and is stepping into the miraculously working elevator to head up to Peter and May’s apartment.

Tony doesn’t bother to knock before trying the handle; it’s locked, which means May must still be down at the hospital or out with some friends. He pulls out the key May gave him what is to him five-years-of-time ago and let’s himself in, heading straight to the fridge in the open kitchen to grab a bottle of water, then making a beeline for Peter’s room.

“You decent?” He knocks on the door out of courtesy, then barges in right as Peter pulls a long sleeve t-shirt over his head.

“Jeez, Mr. Stark!” Peter yelps, nearly nosediving as he scrambles to start picking up. The room is littered with books and empty Gatorade bottles, rumpled clothes tossed over the chair and in the corners. The faint whiff of Febreze hangs in the air. It’s moments like these that remind Tony that at the end of the day, Peter really is just a kid. A remarkably special kid, who’s brilliant and whose DNA was altered by a spider bite, but a kid nonetheless.

“You live like an animal,” Tony steps over a pile on the floor that looks like a yellow decathlon blazer. “Does your room at my place look like this?”

“NO,” Peter shoves a bunch of clothes in a wicker hamper, looking very much like his room at the tower currently does look like this. “What are you even doing here?”

_“Wow, Mr. Stark, welcome home! When did you get back, I’m so happy to see--”_

“Sorry! Sorry!” Peter throws a book on the bed and starts to rush over for a hug, but Tony holds him back.

“Nope, you’re a teenager who just exerted himself all night, stay at least an arm’s length away from me,” Tony clasps Peter’s shoulders and squeezes them lightly. They’re trembling slightly. Tony gets it, the relief he feels being able to see that his dumb kid didn’t kill himself while he was away is palpable. “Your face is beet red. I’ll hug you after you shower.”

“I’m not that bad,” Peter smiles. He looks a little breathless, and underneath the flush on his face and neck he looks a little peaky. Tony eyes him.

“You look like you’ve been out in the sun for four hours.”

Peter looks down at himself through the neck of his t-shirt. “It’s not that bad. I’m usually splotchier after being in the sun. I’m just hot.”

“You’re disgusting,” he steps away and ruffles his sweaty hair. “And it’s almost your bedtime.”

“It’s Friday, Mr. Stark,” Peter rolls his eyes, turning away to pick up the suit from the floor.

“Well, it’s almost my bedtime. I wanted to come say ‘hi,’ but Pep insisted I be back by twelve,” Tony watches, bemused as Peter tries to fold the suit. His fingers are shaking slightly. “Have you been sleeping?”

“Yes!” Peter gives up on folding his suit and throws it over the chair.

“You look exhausted.”

“Busy night,” Peter turns around and shrugs in his direction. Tony thinks he inwardly flinches but he’s moving smoothly and doesn’t look injured. Maybe he’s just being paranoid; the kid expends a lot of energy swinging around, and this is the first time he’s seeing him in two weeks.

“Lots of cats in trees?”

“And old ladies out trying to cross streets,” Peter jokes, flopping down on the bottom bunk of his bed. “But you should tell me about Arizona. What did you do? Did you take pictures? What was the hotel like--”

And just like that, the kid is off. Tony chuckles as he starts babbling, clearly earnest but also clearly trying to change the subject. Tony decides to let him; Pepper set a curfew and really, he was only coming to say _hello._ Peter has gotten better at letting him know when there’s something wrong, and surely he’s allowed to be worn and worked up after a patrol. At the least, he doesn’t look injured, and knowing Peter that’s as much as Tony can really hope for.

“--did you bring me anything? Did you bring home any food?”

“Maybe. Also wine you can’t have and some cheese you can, when you and your aunt come for dinner tomorrow.”

“You’ll let me have a glass,” Peter smirks, tossing a workbook to his bedroom floor. “You always do--” 

A car alarm suddenly blares outside the window, and Peter gasps, downright flinching and pressing both hands over his ears. Tony is at his side in an instant, twisting to peer out the small window. That was a pretty violent reaction to something that probably happens several times a night in Queens.

“Just a cat jumping on a car, bud,” he squeezes Peter’s shoulders. “You okay? You practically jumped out of your skin…”

“Yeah,” Peter exhales hard, hands still pressed to the sides of his head. “Just really loud.”

Tony removes his hand from Peter’s shoulder; he’s wet and clammy through the thin cotton. “What do you mean, loud?”

“I mean _loud_ , Mr. Stark,” Peter lowers his hands and twists his fingers in his lap. “It’s been one of those days--”

“Peter.”

“I know!” He looks up at him. “I know, but it’s mostly just been that--everything is on edge. But I feel fine. We’ve done this before.”

Tony frowns and scans Peter up and down. He does look _mostly_ fine--still sweaty and flushed, and still a little shaky, and if Peter hadn’t jumped so high he probably would have continued to chalk it up to patrolling. Except--

“What’s this?” Tony reaches out, and pokes around a small shadow on the side of Peter’s neck.

“Ow!” Peter jumps away, scooching to the opposite end of his bed. “Jesus. You’re just as bad as May.”

“Ok, calm down, tough guy,” Tony moves to stand in front of him and grabs his chin, tilting his head up. “Looks like a--”

“Swollen lymph node, I know,” Peter bats his hands away. “May already poked at it. She said it could be from trauma.”

“What trauma?” Tony bunches his hands on his hips. They’ve only had one experience with Peter being sick--the Christmas Norovirus Incident--and there were no swollen glands. In fact Peter’s fever never got as high as either Tony’s or Pepper’s, and he recovered faster too.

“Nothing bad, I promise,” Peter looks up, his eyes wide. Tony knows what that look means, and May has been tutoring him in how to avoid falling for it. 

“No, don’t do that,” Tony shakes his head. “I thought we were clear that if _anything_ was wrong, you were going to tell us.”

“And I am!” Peter snaps, his eyes falling from wide-eyed innocence into annoyance. “I didn’t even know about that thing until May pointed it out. And you know sometimes my senses get overloaded, and it’s nothing that’s really bothering me. And I _told both of you._ ”

“Yeah, after we both noticed something.”

“Something I didn’t even notice, because I feel _fine.”_

Tony sighs and rubs the bridge of his nose. “Alright. It’s probably just a virus or something.”

“Except I feel fine, Mr. Stark.”

“But you don’t,” Tony raises his eyebrows. Even he can feel the condescension in his voice, but the Hibernation Incident had put The Fear of God and Other Things in both his and May’s hearts. He’d been hoping it’d done the same to Peter, although maybe not, considering all the kid experienced was a comfy nap. “You nearly jumped on the ceiling when that car alarm went off.”

“Which you also know has happened before. Remember before you left? I stayed in my room at the Tower for almost two days,” Peter punctuates his last sentence like he’s the one speaking to a child. “ _And_ I told you both about it when it got bad enough and I needed to do that.”

Tony sighs again, and looks up at the ceiling. Peter did tell them, then retreated to his room with the black-out shades pulled and FRIDAY on Overload Protocol. He’d described it as being in the very middle of a non-stop fireworks show, the exact same way he’d described the one before Christmas, and then one shortly after school started. They’ve yet to figure out what exactly triggers the overloads; Bruce has suggested weather changes, or schedule changes, or really anything that would put someone in a bad mood and give them a headache.

“Mr. Stark,” Peter interrupts his ruminating. “I just need to close the curtains and go to bed. It’s why I came back early. I’m trying to be responsible. You should be proud of me.”

“Yeah, alright, you got a shovel somewhere in this mess?” Tony looks down at him, his flushed cheeks and slightly trembling shoulders. “You say something if anything changes.”

“I think you’ll notice if I don’t show up tomorrow.”

“Yeah, well I’m going to call your Aunt first thing to make sure. In fact, maybe we should have Bruce take a look at that thing when you’re there.”

“Jeez, you guys are acting like it’s a massive growth. It’s a swollen lymph node! I probably just got hit funny.”

“Someone hit you in the neck?”

“I dunno,” Peter shrugs, and pushes himself off the bed. “Maybe? But I promise I’ll tell you guys if anything gets worse.”

“Alright,” Tony scrubs a hand over his face. “But I want you to go straight to bed.”

“Like I said, that was actually the plan,” Peter gestures around him, as if to emphasize how unusual it is for him to be in his bedroom before curfew on a Friday.

“Yeah, you did. Okay, okay. Where’s your aunt, by the way?”

“I don’t know, out with friends or something. She said she’d be home before curfew.”

“I’m gonna text her that I’m calling her first thing tomorrow to check on you.”

“You said that already, Mr. Stark.”

“Alright, smartass,” Tony reaches out and squeezes Peter’s neck. Clammy and sweaty. “As soon as I leave I want you in bed, curtains closed.” He nods towards the black-out curtains on Peter’s window. 

“Yes,” Peter rolls his eyes, and turns around to stomp over to the window. He pulls the black-out curtains closed, and Tony isn’t sure, but it looks for just a brief second like he has to shake his fingers loose. But then he just turns around with his eyebrows raised.

“There.”

“Okay,” Tony nods, narrowing his eyes just slightly. “So I’m gonna go home and go to bed, and you’re going to take a shower and put on your headphones--” he picks up the soundproof headphones from Peter’s messy desk “--and turn off the lights and _go to bed_.”

“I will!”

“Okay,” Tony nods again, and tosses the headphones at Peter, who catches them, but just barely. Hmmmm. He’ll toss something else at him tomorrow. “Now get over here and give me my welcome-back-hug.”

“I thought you said I was gross and needed to shower first.”

“Well, you spent the past twenty minutes arguing with me,” Tony pointedly looks at his watch. “And I promised Pep I’d be back by midnight so I need to make an exception.”

Peter dumps his headphones on his bed and practically barrels into Tony, wrapping both his arms around his waist. “I’m glad you’re back, Mr. Stark.”

“Me too,” Tony squeezes his shoulders. “Even though you smell like a garbage can.” He unwraps Peter’s arms and gently pushes him away. “What did you do out there?”

“Um, I fished a kid’s backpack out of a dumpster,” Peter smiles sheepishly, then reaches over for his suit. “Can you special-clean my suit like you did that time with the oil monster? I was gonna bring it tomorrow.”

Tony rolls his eyes but grabs the suit. “Yes, I’ll run it overnight. Although this wouldn’t be an issue if you didn’t insist on still wearing this thing.”

“I already told you, Mr. Stark, the people like this suit. The other one--which is great!--is intimidating.”

“It’s also wipeable with Clorox,” Tony grabs the mask off the desk and, against his better judgement, sniffs. “Oh god. Smells like two drifters fucked in an ashtray.”

“Eeeeuw!” Peter wrinkles his nose. “How do you know what that smells like, Mr. Stark?”

“Nevermind how I know,” Tony jabs his finger at Peter’s face, who swipes it out of the way. Tony starts when he feels the telltale prickle of Peter’s fingers sticking for a moment, before his hand drops back to his side.

“What?”

“Nothing,” Tony frowns a bit, then reaches for the edge of Peter’s bedroom door. “Shower, then bed, young man.”

“Yes, _dad_ ,” Peter rolls his eyes, but he smiles and makes to follow Tony out of his bedroom.

“Good. Come over early, I want to fiddle with Nat’s new widow’s bites.” Tony reaches out and ruffles Peter’s sweaty hair. “I’ll see you tomorrow. 

He turns around too quickly to see when Peter flinches.

***************

“So how’s the baby?” Pepper looks over from her bench in front of the vanity as glass door slides shut with a whir behind Tony. “Still alive?”

“Still alive,” Tony taps the housing unit on his chest twice, plopping down on the edge of the bed once the suit has fully retracted.

“Then why do you have a look on your face?” Pepper swivels on the bench to face him, rubbing lotion into her forearms.

“I don’t have a look.”

“You have a look, Tony,” she smiles gently, settling her hands on her knees. “It’s your suspicious-about-something-Peter-did-look. Did he do something?”

Tony frowns. By his count, that one makes eight very specific Looks he apparently has. “No, he didn’t, actually. I found him crawling back into his window.”

“Before curfew?” Pepper’s eyebrows raise. “That seems...suspicious.”

“He said his senses were acting up, nearly jumped through the ceiling when a car alarm went off.”

“Oh,” Pepper shrugs. “Well that doesn’t sound too suspicious. Sounds like he was trying to be responsible, which is more than we can say for you most of the time.”

“Hey,” Tony snaps. “I’m getting better.”

“Yeah, and look what it took to get you there,” Pepper snaps back, but there’s a soft smile on her face. “Well, I’ll be glad if he came to the realization that there’s nothing wrong with sleeping it off. We could probably all use some more sleep. I know I could.”

“Yeah,” Tony sighs and scrubs a hand over his face. There was something else, something that’s been itching in the back of his head, since he thought he saw Peter’s finger snag on the curtain. 

“Ok, you still have the Face.”

“I dunno, Pep,” Tony sighs again and drops his elbows to his knees. “Something else seemed off. He wasn’t just twitchy, like, he was shaky and red--”

“Like someone would be after swinging around the city for six hours?”

“I’ve seen him after six hours swinging in the city,” Tony deadpans. “He’s gross and sweaty and bouncing off the walls, but this was different. Plus he had a little bump on his neck.”

“Bump?”

“Yeah, he said May told him it was a swollen lymph node.”

“Oh, so he told May something was up?” Pepper flicks the light off on her vanity and stands up. Her pajamas stretch tight across her belly.

“Sounded more like May found it on her own,” Tony shrugs. 

Pepper sits next to him on the bed. “I thought you two talked to him about this stuff and letting you know?”

“We did,” Tony nods, twisting his wedding ring on his finger. “And he swore up and down he felt fine, just--” he makes finger quotes “--sensory overload.”

“Well, maybe that’s really all it is,” Pepper shrugs. “And remember that time I had those swollen lymph nodes and it turned out my masseuse probably just went a little too hard? We freaked out for nothing.”

“Kid doesn’t have a masseuse, Pep,” Tony snorts. “He said May said it could be from him just getting hit weird...which does not make me feel better.”

“Well,” she gently rubs his shoulder. “Text May in the morning. You’ll drive yourself crazy if you wait for him to get here for dinner.”

“I told him to come early. Got some shit we need to work on. I’m gonna text Happy to get him first thing.”

“Yeah, I saw you doodling out things when you thought I wasn’t looking,” Pepper stands up and lightly smacks the back of his head. 

“And I can have FRI give him a full scan--”

“Can’t Karen just let you know?” Pepper reaches over to pull back the duvet. “Isn’t that part of the reason you made it--her?”

“Not like a full scan,” Tony waves his hand dismissively, then pinches the bridge of his nose. “Swear to God, Pep, barely back two hours--”

“Oh, you’re only happy when you’re worrying about him,” Pepper giggles as she crawls into bed. “Go to bed, Tony. Karen will alert you if something happens, and Peter will be here in nine hours.”

Tony sighs. “Yes, dear.”

*************

“Jesus, kid, you look like shit,” Happy says as soon as Peter topples into the backseat. “Nice sunglasses.”

Peter flinches, despite trying to close the door as gently as he could. He’d woken up to a pounding headache and ringing ears, and a note from May that Happy would be getting him at 10am sharp. “Ugh, they’re May’s.”

“I could tell,” Happy shifts gears and Peter swears he can actually feel it up his spine. “Don’t tell me you’re hungover.”

“Heh, no,” Peter leans his head against the cool glass. “Just,” he lifts his hand to wave around his head. “Too much.”

“Ah,” Happy says, kindly lowering his voice. “Radio on or off?”

“Off, please,” Peter flinches again as a horn blares somewhere behind them on the road. 

Sleep did not help. Peter woke up to every sound and ray of light sending jolts through him, and he knows he doesn’t have long before he has no other choice but to curl up in his dark bedroom at the Tower. He’s pissed off more than anything else--he’d been looking forward to working on Natasha’s bites since before Tony and Pepper left. Plus dinner with most of the team; it’s no easy task to get everyone together.

“You’re not gonna puke, are you?”

“No,” Peter shifts so his cheek is pressed against the cool glass. He’ll deal with Happy complaining about smudges later. “I’m not sick, just...the sun sucks.”

“Don’t let Tony hear you say that. And into your bag if you need to.”

“I’m not gonna puke, Happy. I promise.”

“Did you eat?” Peter hears the glove compartment open and Happy rifle around. Something loudly clangs around in the compartment. “Maybe you need to eat.”

“No,” Peter shifts again, pulling off the window to lean back into the headrest. “I’m not hungry.” The fact is he tried to eat, but the crunch of cereal was too loud in his ear and the stringy things in his banana pulled and scratched around in his throat and made him feel like choking. He’ll tell Mr. Stark. Happy doesn’t need to know.

“You do know sometimes you can be not hungry and still need to eat, right? They teach you that in school?” He tosses one of the high-protein-crisco-bars Mr. Stark stocked up on and stashed in the lab, the car, under bathroom sinks, his nightstand, in the gyms…just about anywhere Peter might be.

“Yes, Happy,” Peter grimaces when the bar hits him in the thigh. Prickles radiate up and down his leg from where it hit him. “But I’m just not hungry.”

“Well, if you’re not gonna puke, then you should eat that anyway, otherwise Tony’ll have my ass—“

“Happy, _please!”_ Peter doesn’t know if he really raises his voice that loudly, or if his eighth cranial nerve is about to jump out of his skull and make a run for it, but he can feel Happy jump slightly in the driver’s seat.

“Jesus, Pete, calm down,” he admonishes, but he speaks softly, practically whispering. “You gonna make it to the Tower?”

“Yes,” Peter groans and tries to curl up on his side, pressing his left ear against the headrest. “I just need to get to my room and lay-lay down for a bit.”

“I’m gonna text Tony…”

“Fine,” Peter squeezes his eyes shut; May’s sunglasses aren’t exactly the highest quality. “But please stop talking.”

“Never thought I’d live to see the day,” Happy chuckles nervously. “Hold tight, kid.” Peter feels the car accelerate and his stomach twists. He wants to go back to sleep but the vibrations of the car are making him feel like his skin is going to slough right off, so he just curls up tighter in the corner of the back seat and tries to take a few deep breaths.

“Okay,” Happy’s voice is like a punch to the side of his head. “Tony wants to know if it ever got better after last night.”

“No,” he chokes, gritting his teeth. The filling he got in his molar when he was eleven feels like he dropped a hairdryer in a full bathtub. “And h-how are you texting?”

“This is Tony Fucking Stark’s car, Peter. Jesus. And I thought it hurt you to talk?”

“No, it hurts when _you talk._ ” That’s not entirely true. It’s starting to hurt when he talks, both in his ears and his throat. He hears Happy exhale hard in front of him.

“I’m gonna call your aunt, too.”

“Fine,” Peter draws his legs up to his chest, hoping that if he can squeeze as tightly together as he can, some of his nerve endings will _calm the fuck down_.

The longer they drive, however, the clearer it becomes that that is not going to happen. Every bump feels like when he was hit by the train, every car horn like a subwoofer directly next to his head. Happy doesn’t talk for the rest of the ride aside from announcing that Tony will be waiting for them and May will head over as soon as she can. But Peter knows he keeps turning around to check on him in the backseat.

He knows because he can hear it—he can hear the bones in Happy’s neck when it rotates, the pull of muscles and tendons in his joints. He can hear him press his lips together in concern, then shift back around to look outside through the windshield.

Peter feels like his entire nervous system is about to separate from his body. He feels like he did the night after he was first bit.

“Wow, kid, you look like shit.”

Peter gasps when the door pulls open, and the light of the garage and Mr. Stark’s voice both pierce into his skull like icepicks. He hadn’t even realized they’d arrived.

“Oh, jeez, okay…FRI, turn the lights down in the garage,” Mr. Stark leans down and gently takes a hold of Peter’s forearm. His fingers burn through the sleeve of his hoodie. “Jesus Christ, kid, you’re soaked.”

“Ughhh,” Peter groans and allows Mr. Stark to pull him out of the car. His sneaker catches and holds on the edge of the car, and he tumbles out, nearly onto the concrete floor.

“Jesus,” Mr. Stark’s voice thunders through his head. “Was he like this the whole time?”

“No,” Peter thinks Happy motions for Mr. Stark to lower his voice; he can hear the muscles contract in his arm. “Got worse over the drive. Think the kid is sick?”

“Looks like it,” Mr. Stark sighs, propping Peter up against his shoulder. His cologne and the smell of motor oil makes Peter’s nose burn. “What hurts, kid?”

“Ugh, everything,” Peter squeezes his eyes shut as they start to slowly make their way across the garage. “I-I feel like when I first got bit…”

“‘Dialed to eleven?’”

“No,” the ding of the elevator makes Peter flinch. “More-more like fifty…”

“Okay, okay, c’mon,” Mr. Stark leads him into the elevator. “Can’t dim the lights in here, bud…”

“‘S fine,” Peter leans against the cool metal, then thinks better of it when the motion vibrates through his core. “Just-just don’t let me walk into any walls.”

“Think we can handle that,” Happy shifts against his right side, the wool of his black suit rubbing against Peter’s hoodie and shocking him. 

Mr. Stark pulls him closer to his side. “Why didn’t you put on the suit? I built it for shit like this…and it’s sharper than those sunglasses.”

“Mmmrph,” Peter didn’t even think of that. He can’t really think of anything aside from getting to his room. “Didn’t think of it…”

“Yeesh,” Mr. Stark squeezes his shoulder and Peter tries not to jump when his bones rub together. The elevator dings again. “Okay, don’t jump out of your skin, we’re almost there, kid. Hap, call May, tell her I’m putting the baby to bed.”

“Not a baby,” Peter mumbles, stumbling a little as Mr. Stark pulls him out of the elevator. “And I’m not going to bed. I just need to lay down for a bit.”

“For a lot,” Mr. Stark maneuvers him down the hall slowly. “FRI, Overload Protocol in Peter’s room. Blinds and sound.”

“Sure thing, Boss,” FRIDAY booms around them, her voice assaulting Peter from all sides. 

“You want your suit on, Pete?” 

The feeling of the floor changes under Peter’s feet and he knows they’ve made it to his room. His carpet is much more plush than the hallway. It feels pointy through his sneakers. 

“No,” Peter tries not to grimace as Mr. Stark lowers him to his bed. “Too tight, I think.”

“Tight?” Mr. Stark sounds surprised. “Pete, it’ll be quiet.”

“And tight,” Peter slowly slides into the middle of his bed. He tries to toe his sneakers off, until Mr. Stark stops him and pulls them off. “Thanks…”

“Socks?”

“Ugh, off,” Peter tries the pillow but it feels scratchy against his cheek, so he slides down to the slick duvet. 

“You maybe want to try PJs?”

“Umm…”

“Yeah, you want PJs,” Mr. Stark sighs, then pounds across the room to the dresser. He sounds like he’s excavating a mine. “Alright,” he pounds back over. “Up.”

Peter somehow manages to keep himself upright as Mr. Stark quickly--but gently--helps him out of his jeans and into a pair of sweats. It takes all his remaining concentration not to cry; the stitches and rivets of his jeans burn against his skin so badly he can’t even be embarrassed that Mr. Stark is dressing him like a child. The last time he had to do this Peter had been laid up in a bed after being swatted out of the sky.

“This isn’t great, kiddo,” Mr. Stark finally pulls his socks off then squeezes his bare ankle as Peter sinks down to the bed again. The socks land with a deafening thud somewhere across the room, his jeans a loud rattle and a scrape of metal. 

“Just need some more sleep, M’ss’r Stark…”

“Alright,” Mr. Stark sighs and the drawer in his nightstand rattles open. “Headphones on, those ridiculous glasses off. FRI will take care of the light.”

“‘Kay,” Peter mumbles, trying not to shift on the duvet. It crackles and rubs in his ears when Mr. Stark gently pulls May’s sunglasses off his face. “But-but I’m telling May you said that. They’re her favorite.”

“I’ll tell her myself,” Mr. Stark maneuvers the headphones onto Peter’s head, propping up his neck so he can slide them in place. “Sleep some more, we’ll check on you in a bit.”

“Thanks, M’ss’r Stark,” Peter sighs when the ear cups settle, blocking out all the rumbling and clanking and crackling throughout the tower. The tiny bit of light that was seeping through Peter’s eyelids disappears and the room is blissfully dark.

************ 

“Petey, sweetheart,” May’s voice rips through Peter’s skull like electricity, and her hand on his shoulder feels like a branding iron. There’s light coming from somewhere, piercing through his eyelids and sending those familiar icepicks into his brain. His ears are ringing but he can hear everything: May’s heartbeat, his own heartbeat, the electricity thrumming through the Tower. A fan kicks on somewhere below them and it’s like a brick against the back of his head.

“Noooo…” Peter tries to press his face into his pillow, which is soaked and feels like barbed wire against his face. Everything feels like razor blades against his skin, his pulse feels like hammers in his neck and chest.

“Yeah, yeah, I think he’s waking up,” May says to someone, too loudly, and a third heartbeat joins them. 

“Were his headphones on?”

Oh, it’s Mr. Stark, and just like May, he’s practically yelling.

“No, they’re on the floor, he probably ripped them off in his sleep?”

“Too loud,” Peter gasps into his pillow, pressing his hand against his ear. Even his own skin feels like sandpaper.

“Sorry, sorry,” May whispers, settling her hand on his head. It feels like a cinder block. “Was he like this when he got here?” 

“Not this bad,” Mr. Stark bends over to pick something up. “Pete, I have to turn up the lights, just a bit, kid…”

“Ugh,” Peter presses his face against the pillow. _Somehow,_ the light still leaks in. 

“...he was twitchy last night.”

“Yeah, you said. Same with me. He has a swollen lymph node under his neck, it hurt when I poked it yesterday--” May reaches out and pokes under his chin, and it’s like a hot poker down his neck.

“Ahhh!” Peter can’t stop his gasp. It hurts. Everything hurts. “Stop, please…”

“Okay, okay,” May whispers, her hand moving to his shoulder, then pulling away when Peter jolts. 

“I think we should bring him downstairs...take a raincheck on tonight,” Mr. Stark’s hand comes down on his head, and Peter flinches away. He immediately snatches it back, hissing through his teeth. “We can watch better there…maybe give him something.” 

“What do you say, honey?” May’s whispering is still too loud. “Do you want to go down to the bay?”

Peter doesn’t want to do anything. He wants everything to stop. 

“Yes,” Peter croaks, knowing he should, but the idea of moving makes bile rise in his throat. “But don’t-don’t want to move.”

“Okay...what if we put on your mask? Will that help? Tony?”

“I honestly don’t know, it’s snug in there. Pete?”

“No mask…” 

“Well, shit. Okay,” May shuffles on the bed, and the dip and rise of the mattress feels like he’s on the Cyclone after eating too many chili dogs. 

“May…”

“Shhhh, shhh, baby, I’m just grabbing your headphones. Tony, how do we get him there? Can you put on the suit?”

“Suit’s loud,” Mr. Stark sighs. God, Peter can feel it, the wind from his lungs biting his skin. “I’ll grab Happy, he can grab a wheelchair.” 

“Okay, sounds good. Peter, how does that sound?” May touches his shoulder again, and it _hurts._ God, why won’t she stop touching him? Or stop talking?

“Mmmmrph.”

“Sounds like a yes to me,” Mr. Stark stands up. Peter hears his knees crack and grind. “Pete, we’ll be right back, bud.” 

“Should you get Bruce there?”

“Yeah, I’m gonna tell him to come. This isn’t right…” 

“I know, Tony...this one seems...worse? But I don’t remember him being like this, even around the time he said he was bit.”

“It always seems worse, doesn’t it?” 

“And that lymph node...what if he’s really sick?”

“Bruce should be able to tell us.”

“Please,” Peter croaks again, turning a bit on his pillow. It’s wet against his cheek. “Stop talking…”

“I’m done, bud, hang tight.” A herd of elephants tramples out of the room when Tony hurries out.

Peter feels like his eardrums are going to burst. Nothing has ever been this loud, this bright. Everything hurts. He wishes everyone would just stop talking and leave him alone. Through the burn of his skin and the thunderclaps in his head, he feels the familiar prickle at the base of his neck and twists the edge of his pillow in his hand. Even his sixth sense is telling him to stay put.

“Ok, come on, Peter,” May tugs gently on his arm; it feels like her fingernails are going to slice right through his skin. “Up, baby. Let’s see if we can get you a bit cleaned up, rinse off your face before they get here.”

Peter--against his better judgment--allows her to pull him upright and his head swims. The familiar prickle that started at the back of his neck is working its way down his spine. _There’s nothing_ , _there’s nothing_ , he chants to himself, grimacing. _It’s just May, it’s just May…we’re at the Tower...Mr. Stark and Happy are coming back to get me. Maybe they’ll give me drugs..._

“Peter?” She shakes him gently and his stomach roils. 

“N-nothing, just--” he lifts his hand to wave it around his head and gasps out loud. He can feel the pulses of electricity in his nerves, the pull and tug of his tendons. The squeak as they rub together. 

“Are you going to be sick?”

“Not yet,” Peter swallows hard and drops his head. “Just…”

“Peter tingle?”

“Oh my God, May! Stop calling it that!” His voice hurts. In his ears and in his throat. His vocal cords feel like sandpaper.

“Okay, okay, baby, come on,” May gently presses his head under her chin and stands slowly, pulling him off the bed. Her pulse is like a jackhammer against his forehead but he lets her manhandle him, too exhausted and overwhelmed to fight it. “Let’s get you as cleaned up as we can.”

“No lights…”

“No more lights, promise…” they take a step forward then stop. “Petey, let go of the pillow, sweetheart,” May lets go of him and gently tugs on his wrist. The pillow is adhered to his fingertips. _Fuck._ Peter squeezes his eyes shut and leans against his desk, willing the bile back down his throat.

“I can’t,” he chokes. “I can’t…”

“Peter, sweetheart, just let go of it?”

“It’s stuck,” Peter feels a tear slip out of his eye. It’s like boiling water down his face.

“Well, unstick baby…”

“I can’t!” Peter doesn’t realize he yells until it rings in his ear. “Oh god,” the floor shifts underneath him and May is immediately flush against him, holding him upright. “I can’t…” he doesn’t want to start crying, he doesn’t think he can handle more boiling water on his face.

“Okay, okay, we’ll take it with us. Doesn’t matter if it gets wet, Tony can afford new ones.”

May leads him blind across the bedroom and into the bathroom; Peter prays to every god that might exist that his feet won’t betray him and stick to the carpet, the way they did yesterday in the shower. Now that there’s a pillow stuck to his hand...well, he should have told them about that too. 

“Okay, we’re here…” May, out of habit, reaches to flick the light on, then immediately flicks it off when Peter gasps in pain. “Sorry, sorry...habit. Do you have to use the bathroom, baby?”

“I can’t tell,” Peter reaches out blindly for the sink, leaning against the cool porcelain with the hand that currently isn’t stuck to his pillow. It feels good on his hand, the way an ice cube feels good on a fresh burn. “I don’t know…”

“Okay, we won’t worry about it unless we have to,” May flicks the tap on, lowering it when Peter flinches at the sound. She fiddles with something and then Peter feels a cold, wet washcloth plop on the back of his neck. It actually feels good, grounding in a way, the cold water almost pulling the shocks and tingles in his neck out of his spinal cord. “Do you think I can leave you here, baby? Just to get your headphones? See if Tony has a sleep mask he can bring in for the ride?” Her fingers hover his closed eyelids. “Why don’t you try to brush your teeth, or at least rinse your mouth out? Nothing makes you feel worse when sick than a dirty mouth.”

“‘M not sick,” Peter gasps, leaning further over the bowl.

“I think you might be, baby,” May gently swipes his hair off his forehead. “Here, sweetheart,” something pours into a glass, then it’s being pressed into his free hand. “Swish. I’m going to go find Tony or Pepper. Then we’ll sit on the cool tile until Happy gets here with your chariot.”

“Okay,” Peter chokes, daring to open one eye. It’s like sandpaper against his cornea and he regrets it immediately when the low light of his bedroom glints against the mirror.

“If you have to throw up, just throw up, baby. We’ll deal with it later. I’ll be right back,” May presses a gentle kiss against his temple. 

“Okay,” Peter tries to stand up as she scoots out of the bathroom, her footsteps like the drum section of an orchestra. He gingerly lifts the glass to his mouth; the name-brand-- _of course it’s name-brand,_ his overwhelmed brain snarks, this is Tony Stark’s penthouse--mouthwash burns and tingles in the back of his throat, but it’s surprisingly grounding, unlike all the other sensations assaulting him. Peter swishes and spits, flinching when some of it splashes back into his face like tiny glass bullets. “Okay,” he whispers to himself, taking a deep breath. At least his mouth feels a little better. “Okay…”

Peter sets the empty glass down on the sink, but as he’s pulling away, his thumb snags and sticks tight. The tingling in the back of his neck explodes and he flicks his hand on instinct, trying to shake the glass off. Instead of releasing, it hits the edge of the sink and shatters, slicing up Peter’s palm.

“Oh, god!” Peter gasps and crumples to the floor, his knees cracking loudly against the tile. May bursts back into the bathroom in an instant.

“Peter!” She grabs his wrist as he flails blindly, but not before the shard of glass still stuck to his thumb slices through his chin. Peter barely feels it as another thunderclap of pain shoots up his neck and down his spine. 

“May…” he whimpers, those boiling-hot tears falling freely now. 

“ _Tony!”_ May’s voice bounces the bathroom like shrapnel. _“_ Here, here,” she presses something over his eyes; it hurts his skin but dulls the light that’s leaking through his closed eyelids. 

“M’ hand…”

“Oh, fuck, sweetheart…” May isn’t whispering any more, and that hurts. His chin and hand burn, his brain stem is crackling. She fetches the washcloth from wherever it fell and sets it on Peter’s forehead. “I think you have a fever.”

“May…”

“I know, I know, shhh shhh,” May gently guides him down into her lap, maneuvering his arms so the stuck pillow isn’t in the way, and he doesn’t slice through anything with the broken glass. “Happy and Tony will be back up soon. Deep breaths, sweetheart.”

Peter inhales deeply, the air whistling loud and sharp in his lungs. His skull bursts with pain again and then everything goes blissfully dark.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I’m gonna...yeah,” Bruce lifts his tray, and eight filled vacutainers, off the edge of the bed. 
> 
> “Yeah,” Tony nods, pulling his glasses off and pinching his nose.

“I’m gonna...yeah,” Bruce lifts his tray, and eight filled vacutainers, off the edge of the bed. 

“Yeah,” Tony nods, pulling his glasses off and pinching his nose.

“We should get several hours out of that dose, Tony. I can start this, and...at least he’s comfortable.”

“And you’re sure it wasn’t too much?” May brushes Peter’s sweaty hair off his forehead. “I mean, considering…”

“I honestly don’t know, May,” Bruce shrugs sadly. “It’s Cap’s sedative, so it’s obviously more than what I’d give any normal kid his weight, but with what you guys said happened on the way down…” he trails off, shrugging a bit.

Tony frowns and looks down at the piece of drywall in his hand. Peter had unconsciously ripped it off his bathroom wall as Happy heaved his stiff body off the floor. He’d been so tense, every muscle a coiled spring.

Then everything just...stopped. Peter had gone limp in the hallway; Happy had almost dropped him in shock, and both May and Tony had shoved two fingers into each side of his neck to make sure his heart was still beating. There’s two crescent shaped bruises from May’s fingernails darkening under his chin. 

And when they reached the elevator, Happy practically sprinting and Tony screaming for FRIDAY to summon Bruce to MedBay, everything just...fell off Peter’s hands: the pillow, the drywall, the piece of glass that must still be stuck somewhere in the all-terrain carpet. Tony knows well enough now that sleeping, or even straight-up unconsciousness, usually isn’t enough to make Peter unstick. There was one night after everyone was _back_ that Tony was forced to spend in an awkward position on the couch, Peter’s hand completely adhered to his arm, lest he rip the flesh right off. In fact, he can only think of one time he did inadvertently let go of something, and he was well into the stratosphere when it happened. Peter doesn’t just _unstick_. 

He can’t be kept in place when he decides to start squirming, even in his sleep, which his subconscious decided to do as soon as the elevator dinged into the Medbay. He also doesn’t not dent the bars on beds when thrashing around. He doesn’t flail and hit somebody in the chest without crushing some ribs. Surface cuts don’t continue to weep blood after more than a few minutes.

From what he and Bruce were able to put together in the thirty minutes since they got the kid down here, it seems pretty clear: there was a burst of _something_ , and then...nothing.

“...according to FRIDAY, his basal metabolic rate itself hasn’t changed,” Bruce continues, shrugging again. “That’s what makes him burn through everything so fast, but I’m kind of flying blind here, May.”

“I know,” May sighs, laying her hand on Peter’s arm. He’s dead the world now, thank God. Tony hates it, but he hates the way the kid was struggling before. “How long do you think he’ll be out? Long enough for me to run back home and get some things?”

“May, I have--”

“For me, and...some things he likes when he’s sick,” she pushes her chair back and stands. “He likes the afghan on the couch when he has a fever, and his book.”

Tony nods, looking back at Peter. When he was last laid up in MedBay, sedated for twenty-four hours at Cho’s insistence so he could begin to heal, they’d taken turns reading to him from a giant, leather bound book that May told him had been Ben’s. They’d made it to the Battle of the Five Armies before Cho dialed down the propofol. May told him when he’d had his tonsils out she got all the way to Frodo’s good-bye to Sam before he was up and about again. “May, I think I can dig up a copy of the freaking Lord of the Rings here--”

“No, he likes Ben’s book when he’s sick. Bruce?”

“He should be out for a few hours,” Bruce nods and looks over at Tony. “So long as someone is here--”

“Yeah, I’m not going anywhere,” Tony turns the chunk of drywall over in his hands and blows out a hard breath. He looks over to Happy, who’s been lurking in the doorway since he’d deposited Peter on the hospital bed. “Hap?”

“Yeah, I’ll drive you back, May,” Happy pushes off the door frame. His eyes are dark with worry; despite everything that’s happened, somewhere deep down he still considers Peter his personal charge. “We’ll be quick.”

“So long as one of us is here when he wakes up,” May looks up at Tony, then over at Bruce. “And you think you can figure it out?”

“Well, I don’t have much data on Peter, I never really--”

“I wasn’t going to let anyone experiment on him, Bruce!” Tony snaps.

“--Tony, relax, I wasn’t saying that,” Bruce assures. “I’m only saying he’s pretty novel. I froze some of his blood, from back in January...I can start looking at that right away. See if there’s anything different. I’ll have FRIDAY run every test on this new stuff she can think of.”

“Would everything just, disappear?”

“Jesus, May, none of us are that lucky,” Tony sighs, dropping into a chair on the other side of the bed. He tosses his glasses on the small side table. Next to him, the monitor watching Peter’s vitals beeps steadily.

May huffs. “Including him. You’ll stay?”

“Of course,” he looks up at her. “We’ll fix it.”

“Alright,” May lifts Peter’s unbandaged hand and presses a kiss to his knuckles. “Sleep tight, baby. I’ll be back.” Peter doesn’t so much as stir as she stands, brushing his hair back once more, tucking some of it under the noise-cancelling headphones they’d placed back on him. “Let’s go Happy. I want to hurry back.”

“You got it. Tony, I’ll call if there’s traffic.”

“Yeah, thanks Hap,” Tony waves his hand, staring intently at Peter. “And for helping to get him down there.”

“Part of my job,” he smirks. “ _Asset management_ , remember?”

“Yeah, yeah, just drive fast,” Tony looks over at Bruce as May and Happy file out of the room. “You gonna get started on that?”

“Yeah, I’ll keep you posted. I might need more.”

“I don’t think he’s going anywhere, Bruce,” Tony reaches out and pats Peter’s arm, as if he can hear the joke. “Let me know if you think you find anything.”

“I will, Tony,” Bruce nods earnestly. “Everything looks steady...and we’ll figure this out. FRIDAY will let me know if any of his vitals change.”

“Oh, you’ll hear me too if anything goes wonky.”

“We’ll get it, Tony.”

“Yeah, thanks, Bruce. Get going.”

Bruce tries to smile reassuringly before turning, both him and his tray of blood disappearing out into the hallway. Tony squeezes the piece of drywall in his lap and turns back to Peter.

“What’s going on with you, kid?” He reaches for the footrest handle on his chair and pops it up. “Every goddamn week it’s something new with you.”

Peter doesn’t answer, of course he doesn’t, but the heart monitor continues to beep, loud and reassuring. Tony sighs and leans his head back, pinching the bridge of his nose. Sooner or later, Peter is going to kill him.

**********

Tony is in the hallway of the Medbay, and his heart jumps in his chest. This isn’t where Peter’s room is, the Medbay room Tony had essentially remodeled into a second bedroom after the Loki-alien incident because he couldn’t bear to see Peter Parker in an actual hospital bed.

This is the hallway none of them ever want to go down. His heart stops jumping into his chest and rams up into his throat.

Bruce materializes next to him.

“I didn’t have enough time, Tony,” his voice like steel. Tony looks at him, and his normally friendly eyes are hard. “You should have let me study him. I could have learned. We could have stopped this.”

“Bruce--”

“You could have stopped this. But you didn’t let any of us run any tests,” he spits through his teeth. “Now go look at what you did.”

“Bruce, Cap’s meds, you said they’d--”

“Don’t put this on me. _You_ did it.”

Bruce turns on his heel and leaves Tony in front of the windowless metal door. The all-to-familiar pressure settles on his chest, his heart thudding in his ears.

“No,” Tony swallows hard. “He’s asleep, he was just asleep…just a sedative...” He presses the heels of his palms into his eyes and tries to pull in a deep breath. “He’s asleep…I saw him…”

The heavy steel door swings open, heels clicking on the floor. Pepper steps out, her face red and wet, mascara running down her cheeks. The door slams shut behind her, the heavy clang echoing down the sterile hallway.

She doesn’t say anything, but she looks at him hard, searching his face as more tears roll down her cheeks and drip into the collar of her maternity blouse.

Bile rises in Tony’s throat, threatening to burn him inside out. “Where’s...Pep,” the words feel like ashes in his mouth. “Pepper. Where’s Peter?”

“How could you,” Pepper only whispers, glaring at him. “This is why, Anthony. This is why I didn’t want this.”

“Pep,” Tony reaches out, grabbing Pepper’s shaking hands. She recoils immediately, one of her fingernails scratching into his palm. 

“Don’t touch me,” she grits out, scrubbing her red cheeks. “You did this. You let this happen!”

“Pepper, please, where is he?”

“GO ASK MAY!” She screams. “Go! Go ask her. And then you tell her why you let this happen!”

“Pepper, please,” Tony reaches out again. “Please, I told you, yesterday,” he squeezes his eyes shut as Pepper pushes his hands away. “I knew something was off, but--”

“You knew. You knew and you didn’t do anything,” Pepper chokes on a sob. “And now it’s too late. It’s always too late with you, Tony.”

“Honey--”

“Go,” Pepper huffs and shakes her head. “Save your explanations for May.” She steps around him, outside of reach and runs down the hall, her heels echoing through the cold, empty hallway.

Tony doesn’t want to open the metal door in front of him; more than anything he wants to turn and run, up a floor to the bright room where the kid was asleep. _He was asleep…_

But something pulls him, something outside himself, and he watches helplessly as his hand lifts and reaches for the stainless steel door handle. His legs move and he jumps as the loud door slams behind him.

The room is cold and smells like antiseptic, the bare bulb on the ceiling glinting over metal and glass.

May is suddenly in front of him, standing next to the steel table, her face completely blank. Tony doesn’t dare look down, so he forces himself to watch her. He can’t look down. He can’t. He doesn’t want to look at what made Bruce and Pepper look at him with such disgust. 

“Don’t look at me, Tony Stark,” May hisses. “You look at him.”

“May--”

“YOU LOOK AT HIM!” May moves with inhuman speed, crossing the room before Tony can blink. She grabs the back of his head and forces it down towards the table. “Look. At. Him.”

It doesn’t look like him. His skin is waxy and pale, gray in the harsh light of the room. His eyes stare blankly at the ceiling, half-lidded and completely devoid of life. Dull. It’s not Peter. It’s not his boy. Not anymore.

“Pete,” Tony chokes, the name catching in his throat as he looks at his worst nightmare. Again. “Peter…”

“He can’t hear you,” May’s fingernails dig into the back of his neck. “Because you didn’t fix it. You said you would fix it!”

“Kiddo--” he reaches up, shaky fingers brushing against his forehead. His skin is cold, colder than the room. He was so warm only a few minutes ago, when he pushed a second pillow under his head after Bruce injected the sedative. Warm and alive. Obviously sick and struggling, but still overflowing with _life._ And now he’s freezing, marble on a cold metal slab. “This isn’t right…”

“What do you know about _right?”_ May spits in his ear. “He’s like this because of _you_.”

“He’s not, he’s not…” Tony lays his hand on Peter’s forehead. He’s so _cold_. “I was...May, I was just with him…”

“And then you left and now he’s like this.”

“You went back to Queens, to get some things...” Tony whispers, more to himself, his fingers stroking through Peter’s hair, trying to focus on what he remembers rather than the fact that Peter isn’t grumbling and ducking away from him. “I-I was going to stay with him, after Bruce--it was just his powers, he, he went to sleep...”

“You were supposed to fix it. You said you would fix it.”

“I fell asleep…” Tony exhales hard, his fingers pressing against Peter’s scalp. Not Peter. This isn’t Peter. He’s had these dreams before, nightmares about failing everyone around him. Pepper falls, Rhodey falls, Happy is overcome by a wall of flames, his parents have the life choked out of them--and usually when he fails Peter he’s left with ash. This is new, and it’s not right. Tony _knows_ it’s not right. “I just need--”

“You need to stay here with him,” May shoves Tony hard, pushing him into the metal table. “You stay and you watch him until you _fix this_.”

Then May is gone, and Tony is alone in the cold, empty room. His breathing echoes throughout the space, bouncing across the metal walls and thundering in his ears. 

“Wake up, Stark,” he grits through his teeth, his hand reaching out and gripping Peter’s wrist. Ice cold. “This isn’t real…” he knows it’s not real, it can’t be. He wouldn’t have slept through Peter dying. Cho would be here. Everyone would be here. Happy, Rhodey, Nebula, God, Loki would have materialized and murdered him on sight. He’d have let him. But he wouldn’t have slept through his kid dying. He’d have _felt_ it. 

“It’s not real,” Tony squeezes his eyes shut, pressing his hand against Peter’s forehead. “It’s not real, and you need to wake up, kiddo. I need to wake up. Wake up!”

His voice echoes across the stainless steel. Tony forces himself to open his eyes, cataloguing everything on the body in front of him. It’s all wrong. Peter’s chin and hand are uninjured. He’s in hospital scrubs, not the fuzzy fleece pants and worn hoodie he’d been in. His hair is longer and unkempt; Tony himself had made Peter’s last haircut appointment, and he’d laughed through the entire thing as Peter was completely flummoxed by the opulence of Tony Stark’s barber. That was three weeks ago. He’s thinner, shorter, with none of the bulk and height he’d put on over the past year.

“This isn’t right,” Tony says again, exhaling a long breath. “I know this isn’t real, kid, I know it...I need you to wake up, and to wake me up…” He presses his palm hard against Peter’s cold forehead. Somewhere, faint and muffled, Tony thinks he hears a steady beep. Down the hall, in the back of his skull. But Peter’s eyes continue to stare blank and dull at the ceiling. “Come on...Pep, May...Jesus, Bruce...I gotta wake up…”

Suddenly, Peter’s dead eyes squeeze shut, and Tony rears back from the table, banging into a mayo stand and sending scalpels and forceps skidding across the floor. The metal bangs and clanks throughout the room, Tony’s heart pounding in his ears and threatening to jump out of his chest. 

He jerks in the hospital chair, his arm flying out and knocking against the chair’s tray, sending his phone and an incentive spirometer clattering to the floor and shock waves up to his shoulder. Next to him, Peter sneezes in his sleep, once, then again as he jerks awake.

“Nnnnngghh,” he groans, pressing his face into his pillow, curling further in on himself. Tony almost vomits with relief, and it takes all his resolve to not reach across the bed and pull the kid directly into his lap. The heart monitor next to the bed beeps steadily, a little faster now than when Bruce first shot him up with the sedativer, but steadily nonetheless. It’d never stopped.

Tony gulps in air like a drowning man, pushing the footrest down and hauling himself to the edge of the chair. He blinks hard and rubs his eyes: sure enough, Peter is curled in the bed, his chin and arm bandaged, the heavy headphones slightly askew. He’d _known_ it was just a dream. Frankly, Tony would prefer the ash to the way Peter’s lifeless eyes had stared at nothing. He takes another stuttering breath. He has to figure this out. He _has_ to. He can’t fail his kid _again_.

But right at this moment, all Tony can think to do is stare, while Peter groans and rolls onto his side, trying to curl into a tighter ball. He always looks so small when he’s in a hospital bed; he looks like the kid he is.

Tony needs to figure this out, but he’s still going to watch for a few more moments while his heart slows down and his breathing evens out. He doesn’t even know if Peter’s fully awake yet, and he doesn’t care if he falls back to sleep, so long as the heart monitor continues beeping.

It’s a few more seconds before one of Peter’s eyes crack open the tiniest bit. Tony takes a moment to breathe deeply and steady his voice. He tries to keep the fear out of his eyes as he smiles when Peter’s gaze flicks over to him. “There he is.”

*****

Something drags Peter back to consciousness, pulling him up from the all-encompassing cocoon of blackness. 

“Aaahhh-chooo!” His entire body convulses with the sneeze. He whines—he can’t help it—curling away from some vibrations--a machine beeping?--behind him. His head is still pounding, and there’s a distinct ringing in his ears, but everything is muted. His body feels like it weighs a thousand pounds, but he doesn’t feel like he’s breaking apart at the seams anymore. He wants to go back to sleep.

“Noooo,” he tries to roll to his side, but there’s something on his head, pressing painfully into the side of his skull and a sting when his chin hits the pillow. Carefully, he cracks one eye open. 

Mr. Stark smiles gently from his chair next to the bed, lips moving.

“What?” Peter gingerly pulls the sound-proof headphones off his ear. His hand is bandaged. 

“I said, _there he is,_ ” Mr. Stark smiles again, reaching out to gently remove the headphones. “Okay to take these off?”

“I-I think so,” Peter coughs, clearing his throat. Everything feels full, and heavy, but nothing is on fire anymore. Except his hand. He looks down and sees the pillow that was attached to his other hand is gone. “Where’s the pillow?”

“Fell off, in the elevator. Still need to find that shard of glass,” Mr. Stark gently sets the headphones on the bedside table, and the sound doesn’t send crack through Peter’s skull, so thank god for that. “You got your hand and chin good, though. You think you can sit up? Drink something?”

Peter thinks a moment, then nods. Mr. Stark obliges, hooking his hands under his armpits and helping to haul him up. The movement feels like it takes every bit of strength Peter has, like his muscles don’t have anything to give him. His legs feel shaky under the thin sheet on the bed. Something is wrong.

“How long was I asleep?” Peter rubs his eyes, taking the glass he’s handed. It’s so heavy. Mr. Stark is blurry, the whole room is.

“About six hours,” Mr. Stark smooths down his hair, then sinks back into the chair. He’s holding something in his lap. “You took a piece of drywall with you when Happy was carrying you out of the bathroom.”

“I couldn’t unstick,” Peter mumbles, rubbing his eyes again. He looks down at his hands and concentrates until they come into clear focus. “My hand…”

“Sliced it open. Your chin too…” Mr. Stark hesitantly says. “Um--”

“What?” Peter turns to squint at him, trying to get him to focus clearly, but he doesn’t, wavering in and out, like there’s something in his eyes. Or the way he used to struggle when he needed glasses, before the bite. When everything was blurry, and he was a ten-year-old with thick coke-bottle lenses because he had the worst case of astigmatism his opthamologist had ever seen. Or at least that’s what he said. 

“Is it too bright, bud?”

“No,” Peter rubs his eyes again and shakes his head, but it doesn’t help. “Everything is just blurry. But it doesn’t hurt anymore. Not really.” He clears his throat again, it feels scratchy, and dry. Swollen. He didn’t think he’d screamed that much earlier.

“Pete,” Mr. Stark leans over, holding the piece of drywall Peter apparently ripped off the bathroom wall when he was unconscious. At least he thinks that’s what it is. It’s a blur, just like Mr. Stark and the rest of the room is. “Try sticking to this?”

“What?” Peter pushes himself up further on the bed. He’s thankful everything feels softer, but wishes his muscles would be more cooperative.

“Stick,” Mr. Stark holds it out to him. “To this. Or anything, I don’t care.”

“Alright…” Peter reaches out, takes the chunk from him in his uncut hand. It’s heavy, heavier than it should be. “Um…” he turns his hand and the drywall immediately drops into his lap. “Wait.”

Beside him, Mr. Stark leans forward, reaching for his arm. “Pete…”

“Hang on,” Peter presses his palm to the plaster, but when he lifts it the drywall remains in his lap.

“Bud…”

“Hang on, Mr. Stark,” Peter snaps, too loudly he’s sure, and pushes his fingertips against the piece again. He concentrates, hard, almost the same way he had to in the beginning to get himself to _unstick_. Nothing. “Mr. Stark,” his eyes fill with tears, blurring the already fuzzy drywall in his lap. _Oh god_. “Mr. Stark…”

“Hey, hey,” Mr. Stark is out of his chair and on the side of the bed in an instant, one arm wrapping around Peter’s shoulder. “Don’t panic…”

“Why aren’t I sticking?” Peter chokes back a sob, trying again with the drywall, this time with his bandaged hand. His hand that hadn’t healed, and should have in six hours. “My-my hand…”

“Doesn’t have a deep cut, and neither does your chin…”

“I can’t--I can’t see…” 

“Peter, take a deep breath, Bruce is working on it right now, he’s got a load of your blood, we’re working on it…”

“Mr. Stark,” Peter moans. “Mr. Stark...I can’t...my powers…”

“Appear to be on hiatus, bud,” Mr. Stark pulls him closer. “Like I said, we’re working--”

“Where’s May?!?”

“She ran back to Queens to get you some clothes and stuff, after Happy got you down here and Bruce hooked you up. She’ll be back in a bit.”

“She needs to come back!”

“Peter, she’s going to, Happy drove her, she’ll back back in a bit--”

“I want May!” Peter cries, the tears coming full force right now. One minute his powers are going haywire, and the next he wakes up and they’re gone. Healing, sticking, obviously his muscles are tired--his strength is gone. “Oh, god!”

“Peter, it’s not gonna help anything to get worked up,” he rubs Peter’s shoulder. “You’re exhausted, she’ll be back in a few hours…”

“How the fuck am I supposed to not get worked up?!?” Peter screams, burying his face into his hands. “My. Powers. Are. GONE!”

“Peter, it’s been a few hours, we don’t know that, kiddo!”

“They’re gone…” _They’re gone they’re gone they’re gone._ His eyes are bad again. The allergies will come back, the asthma. He’s just going to be Peter Parker again. Not Spider-man, not an Avenger. Not Tony Stark’s kid. Just regular Peter Parker, who can’t eat shrimp and gets winded going up stairs and shoved into lockers every day without the ability to break out. “They’re gone…”

“Pete, you’re panicking, bud,” Mr. Stark reaches in front of him and gently rubs his sternum with his first knuckle. He does that when Peter takes a hit that knocks the wind out of him. He did, anyway. He’s not going to anymore. “Take a deep breath for me. We don’t know what’s happening yet.”

“I do,” Peter gasps, hands dropping from his face. His wrist knocks hard into the drywall still in his lap and it _hurts_. “Everything’s gone.”

“Peter…”

“Stop,” Peter cries. “They’re gone!”

He feels Mr. Stark’s arms try to catch him as he doubles over on the bed. Everything is gone.

******

Tony blows out a breath and peeks through the doorway into the Medbay room. Peter is still curled in a ball on the bed, back to the door. He’d let the kid cry and then given him some time, gone to see what Bruce was up to with the eight vials of blood he took while Peter was out. His chest feels like it’s about to explode with a mix of emotions he wouldn’t be able to explain if he tried: panic that Peter might really be losing his powers, and the tiniest sense of relief, that maybe this meant the kid would have to stop throwing himself into danger every day. That’d he’d have no other choice but to be a _kid_ , going to school and having friends and tucked away safe in Tony’s lab where whatever Villain of the Week couldn’t try to hurt him. 

Okay, maybe it was more like a large sense of relief. But with that relief came shame, for thinking that. For selfishly wanting something he knows would devastate Peter. Tony is nothing if not a dirty hypocrite.

Tony knocks on the door frame. “Am I allowed back in?”

Peter doesn’t answer; he simply shrugs where he’s curled up facing the wall.

Tony takes that as a _yes--_ frankly, he would have taken an outright _no_ as a _yes_ \--and steps inside. “Eyes still blurry?”

“Obviously.”

“What do you mean, _obviously?”_ Tony sits on the narrow bed, reaching out to rub Peter’s shoulder.

“I mean, obviously, because I lost my powers,” Peter sniffs and swallows hard. He sounds angry now, instead of hopeless like when he sobbed into Tony’s shoulder. “I’m going to need glass-glasses again, and, and I’m gonna need an inhaler again, and--”

“You had asthma?”

“Yes, _Tony_ , I had asthma. I had asthma and was allergic to shellfish and mangoes and I wasn’t Spider-man!”

“Pete--”

“In fact, I don’t even know why I’m here,” Peter suddenly bolts up and throws off the thin sheet covering his legs. His arm knocks into Tony and it doesn’t hurt like it always did. He looks up at the ceiling and shrugs dramatically. “I can just go to a regular hospital now! No reason to be in the Avengers’ medbay--”

Peter moves as if he’s going to get out of bed but Tony grabs his shoulder and holds him in place. “Pete, come on. What is this? Of course you belong here! You’re an Avenger.”

“Not if I don’t have my powers!” Peter’s voice cracks and Tony’s heart cracks with it. He knew he’d be walking into another breakdown, but it still hurts. It hurts that it’d even cross his mind that he’d toss him out just because he couldn’t lift a car or stick to walls.

“Peter, come on now, you’re being ridiculous.”

“Oh? _You’re_ being ridiculous!”

“Really mature comeback, Pete. You pick that up in kindergarten?”

“You’re just sitting there! I’m losing my powers and you’re _just sitting there!_ ” Peter’s voice is steadily getting louder and more shrill, his cheeks and neck turning reader by the second. He shakes Tony’s hands away and jumps off the bed, swaying a little. Tony raises one eyebrow as he reaches out to steady himself on the edge of the mattress.

“I’m sitting here trying not to contemplate how much worse this situation could possibly be--”

“How the _fuck_ could it possibly get worse?”

“It can get a lot worse, Peter!” Tony is starting to see red; he finally understands why May always laughed when he proclaimed to anyone who would listen what a perfect kid Peter was. “And frankly, if something is wrong and this is the only thing we have to deal with, I’ll take it. This is nowhere near Worse Case Scenario! This, _if_ you are actually losing your powers, is something we can deal with!”

“It’s something _you_ can deal with!” Peter screams, throwing his arm up and wincing. “I don’t want to deal with it! There’s no point in anything if I have to deal with this!”

“Ok, Peter,” Tony inhales sharply through his nose, and wills himself to calm down, and not remember the dream he just had. The last thing he needs is to blurt it out and make the kid feel guilty on top of everything else. “First of all, sit down. Or I’ll bring Bruce in here and we’ll knock you right back out again until we figure this out, because you are _not_ helping anything right now, bud.”

“You can’t do that,” Peter spits, twisting the sheet in his hand, but he drops back down to the bed. “You’re not actually my dad, you can’t actually tell me what to do.”

Tony ignores the way an invisible hand seems to squeeze around his heart and sniffs hard. Somewhere, deep down, he’d expected to receive that response about something, he’d just been assuming it would be over actual Spider-manning, not the fact that he actually may never be able to Spider-Man again. And even though he’d expected it some time, and expected it to hurt, it’s still a shock how much it hurts, and how much it infuriates him. _He’s upset he’s upset he’s upset_. Tony wills himself not to snap and takes a deep, calming breath.

“That may be, Peter, but I can make medical decisions,” Tony forces himself to speak as calmly as possible. “See, May, your legal guardian, had some paperwork drawn up last fall. Guess whose name is right under hers for when you’re laid up in a hospital bed?”

Peter’s face twists into a look of confusion, then drops to look down at his knees, eyebrows knitting together.

“Yeah, you didn’t know that, huh?” Tony closes his eyes and exhales hard, still trying to school himself. “And no matter what’s going on here, that’s not gonna change, not until you’re eighteen. Then you can remove us both from your emergency contact list if you so desire.

“But right now, I really need you to knock it off, kid...” Tony opens his eyes and looks at Peter. He’s still staring at the sheet in his hands. “...and give me a break here. I know you’re panicking, and May’s panicking and once Pepper hears it all _she’s_ going to start panicking, and I really need for you ro not make all the panicking worse by throwing a tantrum and marching out into traffic. So toss me a bone on that one, bud, because someone has to not panic so we can figure this out, and I know I can throw a bigger tantrum than you can and then nothing will get solved.”

“I’m not throwing a tantrum,” Peter mumbles into his lap.

“You are about to, and I get that, but I need you to do it right in this bed until we know what’s going on.”

“I know what’s going on, Mr. Stark,” Peter rubs at his eye. “Everything is gone.”

“And I know that we don’t know that for sure,” Tony takes another steadying breath and sits on the edge of the bed. “So, take a deep breath, plant your skinny butt back down before I call a suit in here and we do it for you.”

“May would kill you.”

“She’d kill me if I let you storm out of here.”

“Well, maybe if I wasn’t the only one _here_ who apparently thinks this is something to panic about,” Peter throws up his arms again dramatically, wincing again. Whatever is going on, the kid is in pain. “Maybe if you were the one who’s lost his powers you’d also be wondering why you were still in Avengers Tower.”

Tony sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose. “Okay, going back to square one, we don’t know what’s going on yet,” Tony scoots up farther on the bed and reaches around for Peter’s other shoulder, turning him on the bed. Peter doesn’t look him in the eye. “Bruce hasn’t even finished looking at just your blood, and that’s just the first of a million tests I’m sure he has. And secondly, Peter, look at me,” Tony reaches for Peter’s chin and pushes his head up. “Even if this is something we can’t fix--and we don’t know that, yet--you _belong_ here. I wouldn’t let you go anywhere else. I promise, kiddo.”

“But,” Peter’s face crumples, and tears begin to flow freely from his eyes. They’re already so swollen already. “But--”

“But, nothing,” Tony reaches out and wipes Peter’s cheeks with his thumb. “Come on, kid, you’re breaking my heart here. You really think the fact that you can stick to things is the reason I keep you around?”

Peter sniffs and squeezes the sheet in his hands until his knuckles turn white, hiccuping a little. “It’s-it’s why you tracked me down…”

“Damn straight it was. Along with the incredible webbing and the fact that a fucking fourteen-year-old wanted to help save the world. Come here, bud,” Tony pulls Peter down into his shoulder. “Even if this is _second_ worst case scenario time, because this isn’t and will never be the actual worst case scenario, we still got two out of three.”

“But I won’t be able to be Spider-Man anymore…”

“Pete, you’re always gonna be Spider-Man.”

“Not-not if I can’t do what I used to be able to,” Peter sniffs again, hard, and Tony has a feeling this shirt will be added to the Ruined By Peter Parker Pile of clothes he designates to lab work now. “Not with asthma! Or glasses--”

“Or glasses, like I need to wear to read a goddamn menu?” Tony squeezes Peter’s shoulders. “Or what about the baby aspirin Bruce makes me take? Or the fact that I still can’t open jars with my left hand? Or--”

“Mr. Stark, it’s different,” Peter presses his cheek against Tony’s shoulder and clutches at the edge of his shirt. The tight fist in Tony’s chest loosens a bit as Peter reaches for him.

“How is it different, bud?”

“You have your suits.”

“Which you’ve helped me make. So we’ll make you one together,” Tony grimaces to himself. Add another emotion to the swirling mess in his gut: resignation that if the kid asked him for an Iron Man suit, he’d give him one in a heartbeat.

“I don’t want a suit, Mr. Stark. I want to be Spider-Man.”

“Oh, wow. FRI, you recorded that right? Peter Parker doesn’t want a suit--”

“Mr. Stark, it’s not funny!” Peter cries, pushing away from him and frantically wiping his face.

“I know it’s not, kiddo,” Tony reaches out and pulls him back against his side. “But either way, we’ll figure it out. We’ll figure out how to fix it or, or we’ll figure out what to do if we can’t. And if you can’t be Spider-man _the way you are now_ , we’ll figure that out too.”

“But I want to be Spider-Man, the way I am-am now,” Peter presses his forehead against Tony’s shoulder. 

“I know you do. And I need you to know that I like Peter enough on his own, Spider-man or not He’s a pretty perfect kid,” Tony runs his hand through Peter’s hair and gently squeezes the back of his neck. He’s sweaty again, but a different kind of sweaty than after a hard training session or a mission. A sick kind of sweaty, hot and clammy, the kind you’d feel on a child with strep throat or the flu. The way he felt last night, and then again when they rushed him down to the Med Bay. “One who belongs here, and always will. Okay?”

Peter sniffs and nods against his shoulder, hand tangling back in the edge of Tony’s shirt.

“Say, _okay, Mr. Stark._ ”

Peter snorts. “Okay, Mr. Stark.”

“Thank you,” Tony squeezes his neck again. “Besides, you already know too many of our secrets…”

“Mr. Stark!” Peter pushes away from him again. He’s still wiping his face but there’s the tiniest hint of a smile on his face.

“I know, I know, I’m awful,” Tony grimaces, reaching out to poke Peter’s cheek. “But I see a smile.”

“It’s an embarrassed smile. I’m embarrassed for you.”

“Still counts, kiddo,” Tony runs a hand up his back. “But I’m serious when I say we’ll figure it out. Not you, or you and May. We.”

“I know, Mr. Stark…” Peter sniffs and stiffly rolls his shoulders in a sort of a shrug. “But I don’t know if I can go back. Everything is so different now.”

“Okay, I’m gonna say it again: you’re getting a little ahead of yourself…”

“How am I getting ahead of myself, Mr.Stark? I am losing my powers!”

“We don’t know that, yet, bud. So please take that breath, for me. And then a second and a third.”

“I appreciate everything you said, Mr. Stark, but I think we do!” Peter pointedly presses his hand against Tony’s arms then lifts it, demonstrating. 

“Okay, so, let’s say you are…” Tony sighs. “We literally just went over this, Pete. Not everything _now_ is going to change. You’ll still have May, and Ned, and Scary Girl Who Likes You, and me and Pepper and Happy. _And_ you will have the team.”

“But I won’t be _part_ of the team,” Peter sniffs, and lifts a hand to wipe his left eye.

“Sure you will,” Tony starts rubbing small circles in the place between Peter’s shoulder blades again. “Even if I don’t make you a suit. Who designed Nat’s new bites? Who helped me get those retro-reflective panels in the nanotech? Hmmm?”

Peter just blinks and itches a spot on the inside of his knee. Tony bumps into his shoulder gently, but apparently not gently enough, because the kid nearly topples over on the small bed. He quickly moves to wrap his arm back around his shoulder and pull him into his side.

“I did,” Peter sags against his shoulder.

“Exactly,” Tony leans his head on Peter’s. “And…” he chooses his next words very carefully. “...I won’t lie and say part of me wouldn’t be relieved.”

“Relieved?” Peter can barely huff, and actually sinks further into Tony’s side. Not quite the reaction he was expecting. 

“Yeah, kiddo. I can’t tell you how hard my heart jumps into my throat everytime you nose-dive off a building, or when a gun is pointed at you, or how much it hurts when you get hurt or when something doesn’t work out, and then you blame yourself...Pete, you’re a kid,” Tony reaches out and squeezes Peter’s knee. “You’re May’s kid and you're _my_ kid and we’d both be thrilled if you could actually be a kid and not have to wait up hoping you come back alive.”

“But I like helping people,” Peter mumbles, sniffling. “If I don’t help people, who will?”

“As awful as it sounds, bud, if it came down to it, that’s not really something me or your aunt would care about. _You_ are our priority. Not Spider-Man. If you announced tomorrow you didn’t want to be Spider-man, I sure as hell wouldn’t talk you out of it.”

“But if I didn’t, then--”

“Then bad things would happen,” Tony finishes for him, nodding. “I know, I know. And that’s why you’re better than all of us and I’ll freely admit it. But you got a whole line of adults who’d prefer it if you went to school and worked in the lab and the riskiest thing you did was sneak into an R-rated movie.”

“Oh my god, Mr. Stark, I’m seventeen. I can just buy a ticket,” Peter snorts against his shoulder.

“You do it for the thrill, Peter! I know it’s not exactly jumping off the tower but I’d take it.”

“Well I don’t want it. I want to be Spider-man.”

“I know, bud. Which is why we’ll figure this out.”

“Even though you don’t want to,” Peter sniffs.

“That’s not what I said and you know it,” Tony squeezes his shoulder, chuckling. “Now I think you just want to wallow in misery.”

“Yes, I do. I don’t have my powers.”

“Well, if we’re gonna figure this out, I can’t wallow with you. So could you do me a favor and--”

“Ok,” Bruce suddenly walks in the door to the small med room, adjusting his glasses on his face. 

“Brucie! Thanks for joining us,” Tony looks at Peter pointedly, to say _take a deep breath._

Bruce adjusts his glasses as he walks over to the bed, dragging the stool with him. He carefully scrutinizes Peter over his glasses, who seems to shrink further under his gaze. “Hey, Pete. How’re you doing?”

“Hi Dr. Banner,” Peter grabs Tony’s hand where it’s still sitting on his shoulder.. Of all the Avengers, the one he has yet to lose any of his childish hero-worship for is Dr. Bruce Banner. Sometimes Tony gets jealous, and misses the way Peter would stutter and nervously yammer whenever he said so much as “hi,” but then he remembers how Peter now feels comfortable coming to him for help or when he’s scared or when he has good news or even when he saw a cute dog, or to cry into his shoulder because he’s terrified of what will happen to _them_ if he loses his powers, and he wouldn’t trade it for the world.

“Bruce, I told you--” Tony starts, but Bruce cuts him off.

“I know you did, Tony, but it’d be more helpful to hear it from Peter. Everything he’s feeling. Pete?”

“I’m losing my powers,” Peter mumbles, his shoulders curling in on himself.

“Okay, I got that,” Bruce reaches out and tilts Peter’s chin to the side, looking at the cut. The bleeding has stopped but it’s still open and fresh, far more open and fresh than it should be after almost an entire day. “And when did _you_ notice, Peter?” 

“Right now. When I woke up.” Peter shrugs, looking at his lap. “Before it was like I couldn’t control them.”

“Describe that for me. Exactly.”

Peter looks at Tony before he starts. “Like when I get the sensory overload. But it was worse than usual. Like nothing helped. And I kept randomly getting stuck to stuff--”

“Um, you did not tell us that part, Peter,” Tony interrupts but Bruce shushes him.

“--and I was going to tell you if it didn’t get better, but I figured it was just like with my senses, like the first few days after I got bit. And then May woke me up here and it was worse than it's ever been, except for definitely when I first got bit. Maybe worse? ‘Cause like if I really concentrated then I could unstick,” He coughs a bit and clears his throat. Tony thinks this is the first breath he’s taken since he started. “And then I stuck to a pillow and it wouldn’t come off, and then a glass in the bathroom, I think, and--”

“And that happened when you first got bit? You couldn’t stop sticking?” Bruce reaches for Peter’s bandaged hand, pulling the gauze back a bit to look. “And your senses went crazy?

“Yeah, at first. And I was really sick, May thought maybe I had meningitis or a super bad flu even though I got my shots but I could move my neck fine, and then it kind of stopped after two days. And the sticking, like I said, if I really concentrated, or like, stopped concentrating? I don’t know. But after a bit I figured it out. But like, I couldn’t. Upstairs.”

“Ok, so what else? Anything aside from the sticking? And your senses?” Bruce begins palpating along Peter’s cheeks and under his jaw, down his neck. Tony watches as he bites back a hiss when Bruce’s finger hits the tender lump both he and May had noticed, and wonders how on earth Bruce absorbed anything Peter just rambled. He’s still stuck on the part where the sticking started yesterday. He _knew_ he felt something odd when he visited the apartment.

“Like, now, everything is, um, _off_?” Peter exhales through his teeth. “When I woke up my eyes were blurry and, and I couldn’t stick. And I feel like my arms weigh a thousand pounds. Like I wouldn’t be able to hold them up”

“Weak?” Bruce finishes with Peter’s neck and moves down his side, pressing over Peter’s liver and around his back, over his kidney. 

“Yeah,” Peter nods, sniffing. “And slow. I feel like every time I move I’m pushing against a wall.”

“Hmmm,” Bruce motions for Tony to slide over a bit and he does, reluctantly unwrapping his arm from around Peter’s thin shoulders. He presses on Peter’s left side and the kid squeaks, jumping slightly. “Hmmmm,” he says again, brows lifting. Tony thinks he looks almost pleased with himself. “FRIDAY, what’s Peter’s temperature?”

“Mr. Parker has a low grade fever. His current core temperature is 99.8. When he arrived at the Tower it was 100.8.”

“Thanks, FRI,” Bruce steps over to the counter and grabs a wooden tongue depressor. He pulls his phone out of his pocket as Tony scoots back over to Peter, who immediately slumps back into his side. “Any pain, Pete?”

“Just kind of sore, all over.”

“Not in your head, or chest?”

“Not really, not anymore. Before everything hurt. Like I kept getting shocked. Or was covered in road burn”

“But nothing specific now?”

“Not really,” Peter shrugs and looks over to Tony again. “Just, like, sore. Like I fell or something, and it’s the day after? Not like bad, but there? And my throat feels like I have a cold, but like, I don’t. No sneezing or anything. I haven’t really gotten sick since I was bitten.”

“Not true,” Tony snorts. “Remember that hibachi grill in Schenectady?” 

“That doesn’t count.”

“Food poisoning counts,” Bruce comes back over to them, the flashlight on his phone shining bright. He holds out the tongue depressor. “Tongue out, say ‘ahhhh.’”

“Bruce, he’s not five,” Tony snorts as Peter obeys, sticking his tongue out with a low “ahhhhh.”

“I need to see his tonsils, Tony.”

“I don’ hab tond-sils, Dahder Band-eh,” Peter manages to say, tongue still out. Tony rolls his eyes.

“Then I need to look at your palate and oropharynx. Say _ah._ ”

“Ahhhhh,” Peter obeys, eyes darting over to Tony again. He immediately reaches up and starts rubbing between his shoulder blades, glad the kid isn’t recoiling in pain like he was when he first got here.”

“Yikes,” Bruce looks for approximately two seconds before pulling the wooden depressor out and tapping Peter’s chin.

“What yikes? Mr. Stark?” 

“Bruce, you can’t just look down the kid’s throat and say _yikes_. What’d you see down there? Pirate treasure? Nazi gold?”

“It looks like a marbled steak, Tony,” Bruce wheels his stool over to the hologram screen in the corner of the room.

“Oh, gee, that’s reassuring,” Tony snorts, pressing his palm hard against Peter’s back.

“Actually, Tony, it is, especially with that swollen lymph node, and his enlarged spleen.”

“My spleen is enlarged?” Peter squeaks next to him, eyes darting up to Tony. _Shit._

“I had FRIDAY run some counts and start a smear, based on a whim. And the fact that your aunt said one of your friends has been sick,” Bruce clicks something on the screen. “FRI, what do you see?”

“Mr. Parker has a higher than typical number of lymphocytes, and several are atypical, with larger nuclei--”

“Atypical?” Bile rises in Tony’s throat and he tightens his grip on Peter’s shoulder. Glands and spleens and atypical cells...

“--I see no indication of immature cells or blasts. I will need to finish the confirmatory smear and start antibody tests.”

“That means he doesn’t have leukemia, Tony,” Bruce looks up from his screen, as if he’d read Tony’s mind, seen the blaring lights spelling out _LEUKEMIA_ and _LYMPHOMA_ in Tony’s brain. He feels a hot flash of irritation; Tony is sure he’d feel much less calm if it was _his_ kid with swollen organs and atypical lymphocytes. “Run confirmatory tests, FRI, look for heterophile antibodies. If that’s negative, look for VCA IgM antibodies. But I’m pretty sure I know what’s wrong with him.”

“What?” Peter grunts against Tony’s shoulder. 

“Swollen glands, spleen, exhaustion, petechiae and white spots in your throat, blurry eyes, low grade fever...Peter, you have mono.”

“Mono?!?” Tony can’t help the outright guffaw that bursts out of him, a combination of indescribable relief and honest-to-goodness amusement. 

“Mono?” Peter jolts next to him, almost toppling off the thin bed. Tony tightens his arm around him and lets out a laugh. He can’t not. “It’s not funny, Mr. Stark!”

“Yes, it is. Mono?!”

“Mr. Stark!”

“Kid, who’ve you been kissing? Does May know? Although seventeen...it’s about time, I guess...”

“Nobody! Oh my god, Mr. Stark! Stop laughing! This isn’t funny!”

“Actually, it’s kind of funny, Peter, but I am sorry you’re miserable,” Bruce clicks something on the holoscreen and it collapses back into the work station. He looks over with amused, but kind eyes. “And the ‘kissing disease’ is kind of a misnomer. You’re just as likely to get it from sharing drinks and the like. Have you taken a drink from anybody’s glass over the past month?”

“Um, all the time?” Peter pulls away from Tony in irritation and rubs his eye. “We’re in high school.”

“May did make you get your meningitis shots, right kid? Just because you’re all disgusting?” Tony reaches out and pulls him right back against his side. “Fucking mono…”

“Ugh, yes, Mr. Stark. And nobody’s been sick but Ned, and we haven’t shared anything in weeks, since we had that field trip to the museum!”

“Well, the incubation period is as long as seven weeks...usually closer to four or five. And people can be carriers and not get sick but still pass it on. You both may have caught it the same time. Or he caught it and gave it to you before he had symptoms. If that’s what he has, of course. A lot of times people pick it up and never figure out how.”

“Okay,” Peter nods slowly, looking down at his hands. “Then--”

“Hey, wait a tick, Brucie...I took a drink from the kid’s milkshake last weekend,” Tony unwraps his arm from Peter and hops off the bed. “I got a new kid coming, I can’t get freaking mono!”

“Oh my god Mr. Stark!” Peter glares at him, looking downright betrayed. “It’s not my fault I have mono!”

“It’s nobody’s fault,” Bruce chuckles and looks over at him. “Tony, your file says you had mono in college--don’t look at me like that, I read it years ago--you’re good. Very rarely do people get it again. We should check Pepper though, just in case. And I think everyone needs a lesson in basic hygiene and food safety.”

Tony shrugs and plops back down on the bed next to Peter. He grunts and pointedly turns his face away from him, but still leans back into his side. “Ok, that’s a relief. And you can make us a powerpoint later. But that still doesn’t explain why his powers are going.”

“Yeah…”

“Well,” Bruce wheels the stool back over to the bed. “You’re kind of a novelty, Peter. I can’t say why, but I can say you very probably have acute infectious mononucleosis, and who knows what that’ll do with your DNA? You wore glasses, right, Peter?”

“Yeah.”

“And your eyes are blurry now?”

“Yeah,” Peter frowns and looks like he’s thinking for a minute, then rubs his eyes. “Earlier I thought close up was clear, but now everything kind of is…”

“Well, that’s something we can test for sure, but EBV--”

“Speak English, Bruce.”

Bruce rolls his eyes. “Epstein Barr Virus, _mono_ , can also infect the eyes. It’s not uncommon to get mono and then get EBV conjunctivitis. We can test different lenses. See if it helps. As for the sticking, and the strength, mono causes extreme fatigue. You could just be too damned tired to do anything, including producing that weird electrostatic control thing. But I think we can say now you make yourself stick, not let yourself. You have to physically do it. And you just can’t right now.” Bruce shrugs. “These could just be the symptoms you’re exhibiting on account of what changed when you were bitten.”

“But then why did everything go haywire?”

Bruce shrugs nonchalantly. “Spider cytokine storm? Immune overreaction? One final push? I honestly don’t know Peter. But right now I’m ninety-eight percent sure you have mono and that’s why everything’s gone. I mean,” he gestures to Peter. “You’re sitting up, which most people with acute infectious mononucleosis can’t really do. You’re drained where someone with your abilities would be drained. How’re your ears?”

“Um,” Peter frowns, and listens for a second, his brows knitting as he concentrates.. “Someone is microwaving something on the 38th floor...but it’s like...muffled? Like I’m underwater. I have to really listen and focus.”

“Plugged ears, but still _your_ ears,” Bruce smiles. “We still need to do more testing, Peter, but that right there tells me they’re not _gone_.”

“So, what do we do?” Peter looks up at Tony again, then back at Bruce. 

“Well, I think we should keep you close, and I can do some more tests. And of course we can’t say anything for sure until the antibody results come back. It’s actually rather fascinating.”

“Not quite the word I’d use, Bruce...even if it is kind of funny,” Tony looks down as Peter sputters indignantly beside him. “Oh, fine, sorry kid, it’s not hilarious, it’s terribly sad that you’re broken.” He pulls Peter’s head a bit roughly down to his shoulder as he huffs. “So how do we fix him? Can we fix him?”

“Well, we wait?” Bruce shrugs as Peter groans. “You just have to wait mono out. Lots of rest, and fluids, and eating as much as you can. We can give you some of the antipyretics we developed years ago for Steve if you get uncomfortable...have FRIDAY order lots of honey because your throat is going to feel a lot worse in a day or two.”

“We can do that. Plant his butt in bed and keep him there.”

“How long?” Peter croaks.

“Couple weeks before the worst symptoms resolve, but you may not be back to the top of your game for a month or two. Well, unless of course your immune system sorts it out faster, which is possible. I honestly can’t say for sure. But plan on being down for a bit.”

“Oh, god!” Peter wails, turning his face into Tony’s neck.

“Oh, relax, Peter, other kids your age would be thrilled to have to stay home for a week,” Tony pinches your shoulder. “And you should definitely be happier, Mr. I’m-losing-my-powers-and-my-will-to-live!”

“Because I don’t want to have mono! And those other kids aren’t Spider-Man!” Peter whines, then clears his throat and grimaces. Bruce eyes Tony over his glasses, as if to say _look at that._ “And what if this isn’t mono and I really did lose my powers?”

“Well, Peter, we have to look for the horses when we hear hooves, not zebras,” Bruce turns back to the counter and clicks his hologram screen. “You look at the most likely first, then move to the differentials. If the antibody test is negative--and I don’t think it is--but if it’s negative, we’ll move on.”

“Is there anything else you think it could be, Bruce?”

“I have some ideas, but none of them particularly likely,” Bruce takes his readers off and folds them into his pocket. “Your DNA was fundamentally changed when that spider bit you, and from what I can tell, that hasn’t changed.”

“Maybe there was an expiration date? Like, it was only meant to be temporary?”

“I don’t think Oscorp meant for anything to be transferred from the Spider, Tony, but it’s something we can put in the pile. But I’m pretty sure this is just a freaky reaction to mono.”

“When will the antibody test be back, Dr. Banner?” Peter untucks his face from Tony’s shoulder.

“An hour or two? But we can do another quick test. Why don’t you text May, Tony, see if she still has a pair of Peter’s old glasses? We can check that pretty quickly.”

“We do,” Peter groans, rubbing his eyes. “They’re in my desk drawer. I kept them...just in case.”

“Ok, well, then let’s call your Aunt, have her grab them,” Tony shrugs. “Along with your school books. You are very lucky all your credits are in.”

“This is like the fourth time I’ll be out,” Peter clears his throat again and grimaces. “Not including the internship.”

“Yep, so it’s a good thing you’re smart. FRI, call Aunt May.”

“Sure thing, Boss,” a beep sounds overhead, followed by the sound of a phone ringing.

_You’ve reached May Parker. For any Nursing emergencies, please page the supervisor on call. Otherwise, leave a message!”_

“Mmmm, I hope we didn’t miss her,” Bruce frowns. “Not that I can’t whip up some lenses, but the glasses would be easier, and a better baseline.”

“Or we could try his mask--”

“Call coming through from May Parker,” FRIDAY interrupts from above.

_Hi, hi, sorry, Tony, I was on the phone with Ned’s mother. How’s Petey?”_

“Wide awake and scowling,” Tony elbows Peter gently, who responds with an even deeper scowl. “What was so important that Mother Leeds took priority over me?”

_Oh, honestly, Tony. I’m just making sure everything is set at work. And she was calling to warn me that Ned has mono, and--_

“And to watch out for Peter?” Bruce smiles up at the ceiling, then winks at Peter. He frowns so hard Tony thinks his face may collapse in on itself. “Well, May, that’s kind of why we’re calling. Peter woke up a while ago, seems like everything is calmed down, but his powers are on the fritz…”

_What do you mean ‘on the fritz?’ Seriously? Is that what that was? In the elevator? And his hand?_

“He means they’re gone, May,” Peter whines, bunching up his shoulders and then shivering violently. Tony briefly presses his palm against his forehead; the kid feels warmer. “I woke up and I can’t do anything.”

“They’re not gone, May, but I’m pretty sure Peter has mono, and that’s what’s been going on.”

 _Oh_. There’s a pause on the line. _Oh...jeez, that lymph node..._

“See?” Peter points to the ceiling. “She doesn’t think it’s funny either!”

“I’m running some antibody tests, but he’s got increased lymphocyte counts, and his spleen is swollen. You should see his throat.”

 _Ok. When will the test be back?_ There’s the sound of rustling and some drawers opening and closing.

“Couple hours. But in the meantime, Pete says he has an old pair of glasses in his desk, can you grab them? It’ll be a nice reassurance...I think he’s got EBV conjunctivitis--”

_And if they clear up his eyes--_

“Exactly, May,” Bruce smiles at them both as if to say _see? She gets it._

_Okay, I’ll grab them and we’ll head out. Peter?_

“Yeah?” Peter squeaks, and coughs a bit, shivering again. Tony tightens his arm around his shoulders.

_You listen to Bruce. I want your skinny butt in bed until I get there._

“The couch work for you? I want to keep an eye on him, and his room is a pigsty,” Tony looks down at Peter when he makes an affronted noise. “Yeah, I looked last night after I got back. You’re a slob.”

“Not a slob,” Peter mumbles and gingerly pokes at the small lump in his neck.

_I think the couch works, so long as he stays there. Are your glasses still in your nightstand, honey?_

“Yeah.”

_Okay, well hold tight, I have to finish some things, then I’ll call when we’re leaving. Maybe see if Pepper can make you a milkshake? You should eat something, and it’ll help with your throat._

“It doesn’t hurt that bad…”

_It’s going to, baby. God, I was miserable when I had it in college._

“Well, that’s two down,” Bruce pipes up from his corner, where he’s pulled his screen back up. “Still gotta check Pepper’s history, too. It doesn’t usually cause problems during pregnancy, but why worry if we don’t have to?”

“Yeah, I’d like to keep this contained to Patient Zero..”

“Okay, actually Ned is Patient Zero, and I--”

“There’s no Patient Zero,” Bruce rolls his eyes. “It’s just...mono. Probably.” He flicks the screen closed again. “I’ll let you know as soon as FRIDAY is finished.”

 _You better._ May sighs over the line. _I’m gonna finish up here. Petey, we’ll be back in a few hours._

“Okay,” Peter croaks, still poking at his neck. Tony pulls his hand away; the kid looks like he’s going to poke a hole right through his skin. “Can you bring--”

_The afghan? Yeah, I know my baby when he’s sick. And your book. Anything else you can think of?_

“I don’t think so,” Peter clears his throat. “Oh, my physics workbook. It’s on the kitchen table.”

_You got it, muffin. Now go get comfy on that fancy couch. Tony, I’ll call when we’re leaving._

“Sounds good.”

_Love you, baby._

_“_ Love you, May,” Peter grumbles, his hand slowly migrating up to his neck again. Tony gently slaps it away.

“Knock it off, you’re going to make it worse. Jeez.”

“Nnnnhgghhh,” Peter whines, but his hand drops back to his lap. Above them, the line clicks dead, and across the room, Bruce pushes off his stool.

“I’m going to go fiddle around with those vials some more, now that I have them thawed.” He nods to Peter. “You good getting him upstairs?”

“You think we’re really okay to take him upstairs?”

“I do, Tony,” Bruce pulls off his glasses and tucks them into his shirt pocket, then heads over to the sanitizer dispenser on the wall. “He’s vitals are stable, and FRIDAY won’t stop monitoring him. Everything seems to have calmed down.”

“What about the sedative?”

Bruce shrugs as he rubs the sanitizer over his hands. “He’s awake and alert. He might have some nausea but I’m not concerned. He might have had it anyway. I’d normally say light foods just in case but with his metabolism, feed him whatever he wants to eat, especially before that throat gets worse.”

“Okay, _he’s_ like, sitting right here,” Peter sniffs and pulls away from Tony’s side a bit. “And _he_ would like to go upstairs, please.”

Bruce smiles gently and shoves his hands in his pockets. “I imagine you would, Pete. I don’t have anything right now I can do that you need to be down here for. And FRIDAY will keep monitoring you.”

“Okay. And you’ll know for sure in a few hours?”

“Sure will,” Bruce sidles towards the door. “Maybe before your aunt gets here with your glasses, maybe not. But I’ll let you know as soon as I know.”

“Thanks, Bruce,” Tony sighs. “And for rushing over here.”

“For the Littlest Avenger? Always Tony,” he chuckles, and Peter’s nose scrunches. 

“Mascot,” Tony corrects, patting the top of Peter’s head. His hair is damp and he can feel the heat starting to radiate off his head. “He’s getting warm, you got anything that will bring his temperature down?”

“Not here,” Bruce pauses and makes a face. “We have more of Cap’s stuff at the Compound...FRI, what’s Peter’s current temperature?”

“Peter’s temperature has risen to 100.2,” FRIDAY announces. “Current recommendations suggest an antipyretic if his temperature reaches 102. Further medical intervention is suggested if his fever lasts for greater than three days or if it rises above 103--”

“Thank you, FRIDAY,” Bruce nods. “I’ll call in a delivery from the Compound, it wouldn’t be unusual for him to hit 102 or higher with mono, but with his enhancements…” he shrugs. “Like I said, FRI will watch. If he gets uncomfortable, a cool washcloth or a lukewarm bath.”

“ _He_ is still sitting here,” Peter grumbles.

“Sorry, Peter,” Bruce smiles sheepishly. “Usually when we’re discussing medical advice it’s because you’re out cold.”

“Hey, so we already got one in the win column!” Tony tries to joke and lightly smacks Peter’s shoulders. He merely glares and grunts, wrapping his arms around himself.

“Remember to drink as much as you can,” Bruce pointedly looks at Peter while he frowns. “Milkshakes or ice cream, both for your throat and to keep you comfortable. And like I said, I’ll let you know as soon as results are in.”

“Thanks, Dr. Banner.”

“You’re welcome, Peter,” he knocks his knuckles against the door frame. “I’m going to go have some fun with your blood…” he trails off as Tony shoots him an annoyed glare. “...yeah, sorry, that sounded weird. But the fact is I hardly get to do this, so I’m not really sorry.”

“Yes, thank you, Bruce,” Tony snaps as Bruce turns on his heel and leaves. He really, really hates the thought of someone experimenting on his kid, even if it’s Bruce, and even if they’re in a situation where they really have no other choice.

“He’s not really experimenting on me, Mr. Stark,” Peter squeaks next to him, voice getting rougher every time he speaks, and Jesus Christ did Tony just say all that out loud? “And like, it’s Dr. Banner, and I know that like, he wouldn’t do anything--”

“Okay, I think maybe we should ask him if mono causes delirium, because the last time you found out Bruce had a vial of your blood you nearly jumped on the ceiling. And that was after you just woke up from _hibernating._ ”

“We don’t know it’s mono, Mr. Stark.”

“It’s probably mono, Pete.”

“Maybe not.”

“But probably.”

“Mr. Stark.”

“ _Peter,”_ Tony presses his hand against Peter’s forehead, despite FRIDAY announcing his temperature only minutes before. “This is what we’re working with right now, until Bruce gets the results and your aunt gets here with your glasses,” he looks down at him, and watches as Peter lets his face crumple into the deepest scowl he can manage. “What?”

“Don’t be mean to me,” Peter sniffs. “I’m sick.”

“I’m not being mean to you, you just happen to be the only teenager in existence who isn’t thrilled to be able to lay in bed for a week and be waited on hand and foot.”

“We’re not sure it’s mono,” Peter snorts. “And like you’d wait on me hand and foot.”

“Nah, I’d make Happy do it. I like to hear him bitch about you.”

“See? You’re being mean!” Peter tries to pointedly cross his arms, but it looks like he’s having trouble doing it. 

“Oh, relax, bud,” Tony squeezes his shoulder. “This is gonna be a long week if you can’t figure out a way to find some humor in this. For all of us.”

“It’s ‘cause it’s not funny, Mr. Stark!”

“Come on, Pete,” he eyes him. “It’s a little funny!”

“It’s not! I’m stuck being stupid and _normal_ for a week! If that’s even what this is! What’s gonna happen to Queens? _And_ I was supposed to get tacos with MJ tomorrow!”

“Wait, you finally asked her?”

“What d’you mean, _finally?_ ” Peter squeaks, then swallows hard and makes a face. “Ow…”

“I mean you two have been making googly eyes at each other for months,” he slaps Peter--gently--on the back and hops off the small bed. “We have a pool going.”

“Who?!”

“All of us,” Tony shrugs. “Me, Cap, your aunt, Happy, I think Thor’s on it, Nebula, even though I’m not quite sure if she actually understands what she’s betting on...Pep…”

“Pepper is betting on my dating life?”

“Of course, kid, she thinks you’re both adorable.”

“I hate you all,” Peter grunts. “I’m never telling you anything ever again. _And_ I’m going to tell MJ.”

“Yes, yes, and she’s much scarier than you. Now,” Tony squeezes Peter’s knee. “Let’s get you upstairs and comfy, bud. You can threaten me more up there. Anything in particular you want to eat while you can still swallow?”

“A Popeye’s chicken sandwich.”

“Pete, they’re completely out of stock. Everywhere,” Tony waves his hand. “Whole country.”

“I want a Popeye’s chicken sandwich, Tony.”

Tony sighs. “Fine. I’ll find you a Popeye’s chicken sandwich. Now let’s go.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The trip back up to the penthouse goes easily enough, especially compared to the trip down hours earlier. Peter whines the entire way, about his hand and his throat and about the tiny piece of glass that snags in his foot when they make it to the elevator.
> 
> “Well, guess we found it,” Tony crouches down and plucks the small shard out of Peter’s sock.

The trip back up to the penthouse goes easily enough, especially compared to the trip down hours earlier. Peter whines the entire way, about his hand and his throat and about the tiny piece of glass that snags in his foot when they make it to the elevator.

“Well, guess we found it,” Tony crouches down and plucks the small shard out of Peter’s sock.

“Nnnnnhhhgggg,” Peter moans and slumps against the stainless steel wall as he stands back up. If Tony’s arm wasn’t around his shoulders he’s sure he would have gone all the way down to the floor.

“Okay, I need you to be honest,” he tucks the shard into his back pocket. “Are you going to be a mopey toddler for the rest of the week?”

“Only if it actually is mono,” Peter slumps against his side.

“Then I’ll be grateful for small miracles and gird myself to be watching a four-year-old.”

“We don’t--”

“Peter,” Tony interrupts him as the elevator dings open to the penthouse. “I’ll give you my new car when you graduate if it’s not mono.”

“And build me a suit,” he lets Tony guide him out and towards the sitting room. 

“I already built you a suit. Several of them.”

“An Iron Man suit. You said.”

“Yeah, so it’s a good thing Bruce is sure it’s mono.”

“He said he was only ninety-eight percent sure. That’s still two percent left.”

“Better odds than I’m used to, frankly,” Tony squeezes his shoulder. “You still want the couch?”

“Didn’t you say I have to stay out here?”

“Well, you don’t _have to_ have to, but I’d prefer it,” Tony gently lowers Peter to the massive white couch. “Just in case--”

“It’s not mono?” 

Tony rolls his eyes. “Yes, on the very, very, _very_ small chance it’s not mono.” He pushes Peter back into the cushions. “Are you comfortable in those clothes? You can’t shower until tomorrow with that hand.”

“I’m fine,” Peter clears his throat. “My skin isn’t burning anymore.”

“I’m more concerned about your throat right now, bud? I see that face you make every time you swallow…”

Tony watches as Peter swallows, like he’s testing it. “Yeah, it’s starting to really hurt,” he admits.

“Then how about a milkshake? Or hot tea?”

“Milkshake,” Pepper says from behind them, clacking down the hall in her high heels. She throws her leather bag on the pony wall, then clacks into the kitchen. “Cold, then hot. That’s what my grandmother did when I had it.”

“How--”

“May called me, they just left Queens,” Pepper kicks off her shoes under the kitchen table and pads around the island. She pulls open the freezer door. “Do you want chocolate or...no, you’re getting chocolate. I don’t know that espresso ice cream is the best right now.”

“Milkshake it is,” Tony looks down at Peter and shrugs. “And your stomach is okay?”

“I think so?” Peter’s stomach audibly growls. “A milkshake sounds good. Thanks, Pepper!”

“Of course, sweetheart! Just relax, close your eyes for a bit. I’ll bring your shake out.”

“Thank you,” Peter looks at Tony and smirks. “And I also still want my sandwich.”

“You are something else,” he rolls his eyes, then grabs Peter’s chin and turns his head. He pokes--gently--at the swollen lymph node in Peter’s neck. “This looks like it’s getting bigger.”

“Hey!” Peter smacks his hands away. “If I’m not allowed to poke it neither are you!”

“You tell one of us if it starts hurting more. Or your side.”

“My side only hurts when I twist a certain way.”

“Well, don’t twist too hard. And scream if you hear a pop.”

“I think I’d scream anyway if I twisted and heard a pop, Mr. Stark,” Peter reclines back into a pillow, and grunts as he tries to lift his legs onto the couch. It hurts to watch, even knowing (mostly knowing) that the kid is just worn because of a stupid, fairly self-limiting virus.

“Don’t push,” Tony scolds, leaning over--and grunting himself--to help maneuver his feet up onto the couch. “Here,” he grabs the rarely-used remote off the coffee table. “Use this, don’t ask FRIDAY.”

“Why?” Peter shifts and settles, grimacing. His cheeks are looking flushed again. 

“Your throat, smart guy. Why talk if you don’t need to?”

“Oh.”

“ _Oh_ ,” Tony mimics, rolling his eyes. “You need anything else?”

“My tablet?” He looks up at him. “And my sandwich.”

“I’m working on it, your majesty,” Tony points towards the tv . “Turn that up really loud so I can complain to Pepper.”

“About me?” Peter clears his throat and turns on the TV.

“No, just the weather,” he gently taps the side of his face. “Be back with your milkshake.”

“And sandwich.”

“And sandwich,” Tony rolls his eyes again and heads to the kitchen, where Pepper is currently pouring milk into the blender.

“Do you think he’d want peanut butter in it?” She looks over at Tony as she caps the milk and brings it back to the fridge. “I think I should, a little more protein and fat. He needs to eat whatever he can.”

Tony looks at her a moment, then back into the living room, where Peter has turned on reruns of the Simpsons. An Itchy and Scratchy short is playing. A headache is starting at the base of his skull, and the blender pierces into his eardrums when Pepper turns it on. He looks back at her, and suddenly the events of the past twelve hours catch up with him. 

Jesus Christ, Pep,” he collapses back against the island counter, his heart starting to jump into his throat. He thinks he’s going to throw up. 

“What? Tony?” Pepper turns the blender off and turns to him. 

“Just,” he waves his arm towards the living room. His chest is starting to feel tight. “This. Him. Jesus Christ.”

“Tony, he has mono. A thing a lot of teenagers get. It’s a little off-track, but Bruce said he’ll be fine.”

“It might not have been fine, it might---fuck,” Tony reaches back to grip the edge of the counter-top. His legs feel like they’re going to give out any minute. “It might, Pep, this could have been so bad…”

“But it’s not, honey,” she comes over to him, and lays two steady hands on his shoulders. “I can see you starting to panic…”

“I knew there was something wrong after I went over there, Pep, I knew it and I didn’t make him come back here…”

“Tony.”

“And what if it wasn’t just fucking mono? What if, shit,” Tony blows out a hard breath. “I fell asleep in there, I had--”

“A nightmare?” Pepper interrupts gently, knowingly. “Tony, you need to take a deep breath,” She squeezes his shoulders. He tries to focus on it, the pressure of her hands, and tries to take a deep breath. “He’s fine. He’s miserable, but he’s fine. It’s all fine.”

“It might not be fine,” Tony exhales hard through his teeth. “There’s a chance it might not be fine.”

“A very, very tiny chance. You said so yourself.”

“False bravado,” Tony gulps down another breath. “I’m good at that.”

“Well, I’m not, and I’m saying it’s going to be fine. Honey,” Pepper runs a hand through his hair. “He’s fine.”

Tony exhales hard through his teeth. “It might not have been fine. It might not be! He’s not wrong, two percent is not negligible…”

“Okay, you need to keep it down, because he’s going to hear you. And then you’ll have a teenager who is sick, panicked, _and_ smug to deal with.”

“I told him to turn the TV up, and his ears are so muffled he has to concentrate to hear,” Tony turns around towards the living room. “Pete?” He calls. Nothing. “See?”

“Maybe he fell asleep?” Pepper peers around his shoulder.

“We could only be so lucky.”

“Hopefully his mouth isn’t open. That won’t be good for his throat. It’s only going to get worse.”

“ _If_ that’s what this is,” Tony pinches the bridge of his nose and leans forward into Pepper’s shoulders. “God, if it’s not--”

“It is. It’s just strange because of his spider-stuff.”

“The norovirus wasn’t strange.”

“Sure it was,” Pepper smiles and lifts his head. “Remember it ended up kicking him into _hibernation_? And you and Bruce figured that out overnight. His body is just dealing with it in a different way, because his body is different.”

“What if it keeps getting different? Worse different? What if it is mono and what happens this afternoon happens again? Or worse than this afternoon? Jesus Christ, Pep”

“Then you and Bruce will figure it out,” Pepper smiles and cups his cheeks. “You’ve gotten him out of worse.”

Tony snorts. “Yeah, you said that before.”

“And I was right,” Pepper leans forward and kisses him gently. “And I’m right now.”

Tony nods, and leans forward again. He lets Pepper stroke his hair a few more moments and wills his heart rate down. “One of these time’s we’re not going to get lucky.”

“Not this time,” Pepper kisses the top of his head. “And even if you both run out of luck, you have the brains to make up for it.”

“And Bruce.”

“And Bruce,” she smooths her hands down his shoulders. “Now, I have to get him his milkshake. And you need to get on that sandwich I heard him going on about.”

“He wants a Popeye’s chicken sandwich,” Tony waves his hand. “He’s ridiculous.”

“Aren’t they out, like, everywhere?”

“Yeah,” Tony laughs and sniffs, shaking himself internally. “Don’t know how I’m gonna swing that.”

“I’m sure you’ll figure this one out too. If not, call Bruce,” Pepper winks, then steps around him to the island where the blender is sitting. “This, then something hot, then another milkshake. I’ll put spinach powder in that one. Get him a vegetable.”

“He’ll know.”

“Oh, I’m sure he will. But he won’t say anything if I’m the one who makes it.”

“Yeah,” Tony rolls his eyes. “Hey, have you had it before? Should we have you leave it on the other side of the room?”

“Yes, my sister and I both had it in high school. That’s how I know cold then hot. Were you not listening earlier?”

“No, actually. I had my hands full with a sick, whiny teenager.”

“Well, I’m sure May warned you too, but he’s only gonna get worse,” she turns on her heel, glass and straw in hand, and heads to the living room. “Sweetheart, I have your milkshake!”

Tony watches her, then closes his eyes and takes a few more deep breaths. “It’s fine, he’s fine,” he whispers to himself, a mantra. “He’s fine, and he wants a Popeye’s chicken sandwich. “Okay,” he pushes himself off the counter and shakes out his left hand. “I can do that. I’m fucking Iron Man. I can find him a--”

“Incoming call from May Parker.” FRIDAY interrupts his rambling, and he jumps slightly.

“Shit. Okay, put her through, FRI.”

 _Hi Tony. We’re on our way,_ May’s voice echoes through the kitchen. _Got his glasses, and the book and afghan. How’s he doing?_

“Oh, he’s fine,” Tony wills himself to sound calm, like he wasn’t starting to spin into a panic a few minutes ago. _He’s fine he’s fine he’s fine._ “I have him on the couch, Pep made him a milkshake.” 

_Good, cold. That’ll help with his throat._ She pauses for a moment. _Is he calmer?_

“A bit. I’d like those test results sooner rather than later. And he wants a Popeye’s chicken sandwich.”

_Aren’t they out, like, everywhere?_

“Yeah, so you know. Maybe I can steal some more of Pym’s shit and go back two months to grab one. This afternoon. In the next hour.”

_Oh, jeez, you’re more melodramatic than he is._

“I know I’m a billionaire May, but even I have some limits. You know where we can get one?”

_Jesus Christ, Tony, order some chicken and I’ll pick up some brioche rolls and pickles on our way back. So long as you have mayo and butter we’re in._

Tony cocks his head and considers for a moment. It’s not a terrible idea. “Think it’ll work?”

_Tony, you know as well as I do that for as brilliant as Peter is, that kid is a dumbass._

“May, you’re lucky the TV sound is up to like a million or he’d hear you,” Tony frowns to himself, glancing behind him into the sitting room. Peter is sprawled out on the couch, making grabby hands for the homemade chocolate milkshake Pepper has in her hands. “And he seems to be solely focused on the milkshake Pepper made him, so maybe this is a good time to get anything off your chest before you get here?”

_Oh, Tony!_

_Yeah, Tony, I got some things---_

_Oh, knock it off, Happy!_ May chuckles over the phone. _But, aside from having a dumbass gene, get ready for weeks of Sick Peter Parker. He turns into an absolute_ baby _when he’s sick._

“Yeah, I remember,” Tony frowns as Pepper fluffs a pillow and props Peter’s feet up while cooing something at the goddamn teenager. “Stomach flu? Four days in the Medbay?”

_Yeah, the first one was a few days, and the second he was unconscious for most of the time. You remember what he was like when he woke up? And this will probably be more than a week. When he had his tonsils out he slept in our bed for five nights._

“Yeah, I’m gonna draw a line with that,” Tony turns back to the open kitchen, heading to the cupboard where he _thinks_ Pepper keeps tea and the honey. 

_Just wait. He’s going to ask one of us to sleep on that damn futon._

“Well, then he’s going to be disappointed,” Tony frowns at the tea cupboard. No honey. “Pep?”

“What, babe?” Pepper calls from the sitting room, where she’s apparently still ministering to His Royal Highness.

“Where’s the honey?”

“We’re out!”

“Oh, Jesus, May--”

_Yes, Tony, we’re pulling into the market now...oh, Happy, just park somewhere. We can walk. Ok, so you need honey? I know over-the-counter stuff will be useless, but is there anything else you need?_

Tony shuts the cupboard. “No, should be pretty good. Bruce is cooking up some stuff and he said everything else is _supportive._ ”

_And no swinging until he clears his spleen._

“Exactly,” Tony looks back into the sitting room again and frowns. The fluffed pillow is now abandoned on the floor and Pepper has Peter’s feet in her lap while he sips his milkshake. “Oh, get some taco shit while you’re there. Apparently he’s missing out on a taco-date with Michelle tomorrow so I’m gonna tell him she can come here tomorrow. If he doesn’t have a fever and is able to shower on his own, and she sits at the other side of the table.”

 _Oh he finally asked her?_

“I think she actually ordered it.”

 _And of course when he finally gets his head on straight he gets freaking mono._ A car door slams. _Alright, rolls, pickles--you order the chicken--taco shit and honey. That it?_

“Should be good. Now, I need to go rescue my wife from your nephew.”

_Oh, god, don’t let her fall into it, Tony. She hasn’t built up an immunity to those eyes yet! She’ll end up sleeping on the futon. Happy, get a cart._

“Rescue needs rescuing.”

_Well get to it. We’ll be there soon. I’ll get more ice cream too._

“You’re a peach, May.”

_Well, he’s gonna be staying with you until this clears so Bruce can watch him, so consider it payment._

“Got it. See you soon.”

The line clicks dead, and Tony takes another deep breath to steady himself before he heads into the living room. They’re both watching The Simpsons, and Peter barely looks up as Tony skims a hand through his hair. _He’s fine._

“Are you getting my sandwich?”

“I’m working on it,” Tony flops down on the coach. “That going down okay?”

“Mmmhmm,” Peter nods. He’s facing the TV but Tony can tell his eyes aren’t really watching anymore. 

“Just talked to your aunt, she’s on her way. Stopping to restock up on some honey. And,” he sits forward. “She’s getting stuff for tacos, if you want to see if Michelle will come over here instead--” Peter’s head turns like it’s on a swivel to look at him. “--since you _finally_ had a date. _If_ you’re not feeling actively worse, and your temperature is normal.”

“Okay,” Peter nods. “Okay, that’s...okay.” His eyes brighten the tiniest bit and Tony smiles to himself. “She might not want to come over, though.”

“I think she will,” Tony nods, and Pepper smiles at him. “And you can grab some pity points--”

“ _Tony_!” Pepper admonishes, but she’s still smiling. “If you’re feeling better, Peter.” She pats his ankle.

Peter sighs loudly. “This sucks.”

“I know, honey,” she squeezes his foot. “But we’ll try and make it better.”

“How long did Dr. Banner say that test would take?”

“A couple hours, bud,” Tony scrubs a hand over his face and leans back into the couch. “Hopefully around when your aunt gets here with your glasses.”

**********

Bruce doesn’t call up by the time May arrives, laden with grocery bags, Happy behind her with two heavy overnight bags and a laptop case. He unceremoniously drops them on the floor and wanders into the living room while she gets the ice cream into the freezer.

“Glad you’re alive, kid,” he smiles down at Peter, then looks over at Tony. “Also that stuff...you wanted. Hope you got the rest of it?”

“Smooth,” Tony rolls his eyes. “Thank, Hap.”

“Yep. I’m going downstairs. Call if you need anything,” he points at Peter. “Don’t die.”

“Thanks Happy,” Peter clears his throat, shifting and pulling his feet from Pepper’s lap so he can set them on the floor. “May?”

“Right here, baby,” May strides into the living room, a pair of thick black glasses in her hand. “Nothing from Bruce?” 

“Not yet,” Tony sits up and steels himself. “So this is test number one.”

“Two, actually,” Peter shifts, with effort, so May can sit between him and Pepper on the couch. “He already did a blood thing. My lymph-whatevers were weird.”

“Okay, two. Let’s go.”

Peter takes the glasses from May, and Tony holds his breath while he opens the arms and puts them on. They’re thick, and heavy, and immediately Peter flinches and closes one eye. The lenses are so thick they refract his cheekbone about an inch.

“No, no, this is bad,” he squints over at Tony, then at May. “It’s worse. They hurt,” he makes a face and looks around the room, then pulls them off.

Tony blows out the breath he was holding, and claps his hands. His chest loosens considerably. HIs false bravado feels a bit less false now. “Test two, a success?”

“I still want the blood test. I’m not gonna relax until I get the blood test.”

Tony isn’t going to either, not completely. “I know. Hopefully soon.”

“And I still want my sandwich.”

“I said I’m working on it, bud,” he looks pointedly at May, who nods slightly towards the kitchen. “Let your milkshake settle a little--”

The ceiling suddenly beeps, and Bruce’s voice comes from the ceiling. _Tony?_

“Dr. Banner?” Peter sits up little, handing his glasses back to May.

 _Hi Peter._ Tony can practically hear the indulgent smile in Bruce’s tone. Good news then, and the knot loosens the rest of the way. Mostly. _The results are back, and not to be too smug about it, but I was right. FRIDAY found heterophile antibodies._

“Hey!” May practically yells, and Peter jumps next to her. Pepper downright beams at Tony, a very clear I-told-you-so. “Bruce, that’s great! Monospot was positive!”

 _Actually_ , _FRIDAY is much more sensitive and specific than a standard monospot test. We could do a VCA too but I don’t think we need it. Peter, you definitely have mono. I am both sorry, and definitely not sorry._

“Okay, okay,” Peter nods, then grabs his glasses off the table and puts them on again, then grunts and immediately pulls them off. “Thanks Dr. Banner.”

_I’d ask why you don’t sound too thrilled, Peter, it does still suck. Just rest and hydration, and FRI will keep an eye on you._

“Yeah,” Peter looks at Tony and shrugs, but his shoulders look a little less tense. His eyes, however, are looking more glassy.

 _Also_ \--Bruce speaks again, before Tony can ask. _FRI is showing your temperature to be back at 100.8. I am going to see if I can expedite Cap’s meds. There’s no point in being more miserable than necessary_.

“Thanks, Bruce,” Tony smiles at Peter, who smiles back, a bit. It’s something.

_Peter, if you don’t mind--_

“Yes, you can still look at my blood. Just in case, you know…”

_I will keep an eye out and let you know immediately. Now eat your sandwich. And get some rest. I’ll check on you tomorrow morning._

“Thanks Dr. Banner. For everything.”

_Anytime, Peter. Tony, FRIDAY will keep an eye out, call if you need anything._

“Thanks, Bruce,” he settles back into the couch as May pulls Peter in tight and kisses his cheek. He’s not gonna fault the kid for not jumping for joy, but he’s still gotta figure out that sandwich.

*********

Peter looks up as May peeks her head in his bedroom, then pushes the door open. “Jesus, you are a slob,” she steps inside. “Does your room at home look like this?”

Peter glares and takes a pointed sip of the second milkshake Pepper made for him after his sandwich and hot tea. The cold is soothing. “No.”

“Mmmmhmmm,” she walks over to the bed and lays a hand on his forehead. “You’re still a little warm.”

“You can just ask Karen my temperature, you know.” Peter takes another drink and frowns; he’s pretty sure Pepper snuck some spinach powder into it.

“I know, smart guy, but I trust my hand more than a robot.”

“AI.”

“Whatever. What do you want to do with these?” May sits on the edge of the bed and holds out his glasses. “Seeing as you don’t need them?”

“Um,” Peter sits up and takes them from her, looking at the thick black frames, and the thick coke-bottle lenses. May had always told him he looked handsome in them, Ben that he looked as smart as he was. He hated them. “Maybe keep them here? Just--”

“So you can check again tomorrow?” May interrupts softly, reaching out to brush his hair off his forehead. Peter leans into it; her hand feels cool against his forehead.

“Yeah. Just in case.”

“Petey,” May smiles. “You have mono. Like Ned has and I had and Tony had.”

“And maybe MJ has…”

“Oh no, is she not feeling well either?”

“No,” Peter sighs and opens and closes one of the arms on his glasses. “I called her about tomorrow and her throat is all weird. And she slept like twelve hours last night and then fainted in the kitchen.”

“You three. They both have their meningitis shots, right?”

“Yes, May,” Peter rolls his eyes. 

“Well, more evidence that this is really just mono, baby. And you can keep the glasses, but they’ll be the same tomorrow. I promise.”

“I know, but…” he looks back down at his glasses. He hates them so much. “Like, just to double make sure.” He looks back up at her. “It’ll make me feel better.”

“Yeah, okay, tough guy,” May rolls her eyes, but she gently cups his cheek. “It’ll just be a few rough weeks. I promise. Maybe even shorter for you. Just gotta make sure you don’t bust that spleen.”

“I know,” Peter sighs and reaches to put his glasses on his nightstand. Every movement still feels like it takes all his energy. “But I’m still gonna be mad about it.”

“I know,” May mimics, sighing and pinching his cheek slightly. “Just know Tony will be here to wait on you hand and foot.”

“Oh, you’re not going to?” Peter snickers, but it comes out more like a croak, and his throat burns.

“Hey, you go with the person who has the most connections,” May shrugs. “He got you that chicken sandwich.”

“May,” Peter rolls his eyes. “I know that was just the chicken on a roll you bought at the store.”

“Okay, but don’t tell Tony,” May laughs and strokes through his hair. “He was quite proud of himself. And he may stop waiting on you hand and foot in retaliation.” Her expression softens. “But we’re all so relieved that all this is is mono. So milk it, baby. Try and find some humor in it.”

“Between the misery?” Peter slumps back into his pillow.

“Exactly, my love,” she learns forward and kisses his nose. “And maybe turn this off and go to bed. It’s almost ten. You’re going to exhaust your eyes.”

“They’re actually not as bad as they were earlier. I can see well enough to play!” Peter gestures to his TV screen; if he’s gonna be relegated to his bed and the couch for a week, he figures he might as well be productive and get all 900 korok seeds.

“Okay, just turn it off by midnight,” May pats his knee. “I’m going to go to bed, do you need anything?”

“No, I have my milkshake. And pretzels,” Peter pats the economy-sized tub of pretzel nuggets next to him on the bed.

“Well, drink your milkshake before it melts, and don’t eat too many pretzels. They’ll irritate your throat,” May stands up, then leans down and presses a kiss to his forehead. “I’m so glad and relieved. Love you, honey.”

“Love you, too, May,” Peter smiles up at her. “‘Night.”

“‘Night, baby. And remember, bed by midnight. I’m gonna tell Tony to come in and make sure.”

“Got it, May!”

“Okay,” she heads to the door. “Do you want this closed?”

“Yes, please,” Peter slurps his milkshake, swallowing with effort. It’s starting to feel like there are needles in his throat.

“Remember, bed by midnight.”

“I promise!”

“Okay,” May winks at him, then closes the door with a soft click. 

Peter sets his milkshake on his nightstand, and turns back to his game. He picks up the controller, and as he does, feels a tiny tingling in his fingertips. It’s like a static shock, and it startles him, but when he flicks his hand, the controller stays stuck tight. “

“Well, shit,” Peter turns it over in his hand, then wills it to drop when he flips his hand back over. It plunks into the duvet. “Huh,” he smiles to himself, reaching out with one fingertip, lifting the controller again. “Awesome,” he laughs to himself, then lets it drop again. He ignores the wave of exhaustion as he reaches for his milkshake again, and the StarkPad with his list of outstanding korok seeds. 

Peter doesn’t want to test his luck. He’ll try again later. 

********

“Well, I see this bullshit hasn’t affected your appetite,” Tony nods to the economy-sized bin of pretzels tucked against Peter’s side and the empty glass on his nightstand. He’s sitting propped against a pile of pillows against his headboard--including his favorite large lounge pillow from the living room--a game controller in his lap and his eyes closed. When he opens them, they look brighter, no longer glazed with fever, but tired.

“Mmm,” he shrugs and closes his eyes again. On his large tv screen, Link is standing in the middle of an empty field, wind ruffling through the grass. Tony likes this game; it’s calming, and freeing, and it’s a relief when he sees the kid go around a battle rather than run right into it, even if it’s a video game. “They tasted good.”

“Then I assume your throat is feeling better?”

“No,” Peter opens one eye and pulls the controller back into his lap. “But they tasted good.”

“Okay,” Tony snorts and sits on the edge of the bed. “You know, you’re lucky one of those skeleton things didn’t get you while you were asleep.” He looks at the tv screen and sees Peter has started Link off in the direction of Mount Floria. If someone had asked him five years ago--erased time not included--if he’d known what a Link or a Mount Floria was he’d think they’d had a stroke. 

Peter shrugs and Link takes a jump of a high cliff. “I’m finding seeds. Gonna get all nine-hundred of them, if I’m stuck here. I was just resting my eyes. They start to hurt after awhile.”

“That’s because you’re sick and you’re straining them. It’s almost midnight, why don’t you go to sleep?”

“You sound like May.”

“Yeah, because I told her when she went to bed I’d check on you to make sure you went to bed,” Tony reaches to take the controller, but Peter pulls it away. 

“Let me just get this one.”

Tony groans, because _this one_ is a rock circle in the middle of a small body of water, and will probably take the kid an hour. He’s surprisingly not good at this game, and most of the progress is made by Ned when he comes to the Tower. “Fine. Then bed, or I’ll give that thing to Happy for good.”

“No, you won’t. I know you’re still trying to get the sword to 60 and you think I don’t notice. I know it was you who used all my dragon horns for mighty potions.” Link throws a rock, and it widely misses its target. “Dammit.” Peter coughs, then winces.

“Your chest hurt?” Tony lays a hand on his sternum, then reaches up to feel his forehead. He knows Peter’s temperature is back down to 99--FRIDAY told him before he even came in the room--but it’s more reassuring to feel it himself.

“No.” Another rock plunks into the water, far away from the circle. “Still my throat. Move, I can’t see the screen.”

Tony rolls his eyes and pulls his hand away. “You know, you could stasis that. Three hits would probably do it.” He grabs the tablet next to Peter and turns it off while Peter glares at him. “I’m just saying. Put it on that little outcrop. Use the sword.”

Peter glares at him for a moment, but sets his next rock on the tiny jut of rock. Stasis and three hits later, the rock lands square in the middle of the rock circle.

“See? Never doubt me. Now bed,” Tony reaches for the controller again.

“One more!” Peter whines, shifting on the bed so it’s out of his reach.

“No, bed.”

“I can sleep tomorrow--MJ said she wasn’t feeling well today either so she’s not coming over tomorrow and I can rest all day.”

“Peter, the fact that you all made yourselves your own cluster of virulence does not mean you should be staying up all night. This is gonna be a haul, even for you.”

“But--”

“No,” Tony bodily leans over the bed and grabs the controller from Peter. “I’ll cut the power supply to your room if you don’t turn this off.”

“I can play on travel mode.”

“Not if I take the controllers, Spider-baby,” Tony saves the game, then pulls the JoyCons off their base. 

“You’re being mean to me, again,” Peter huffs, crossing his arms and bunching his shoulders up to his ears. “I’m sick.”

“And you’re acting like a five-year-old. And if you don’t go to bed you’re going to feel worse tomorrow and you’re going to be whining to your empty room because I’m not gonna listen to it.”

“Mean,” he clears his throat and grimaces. “Oww…”

“You want some hot water and honey before you sleep?”

“No,” Peter shakes his head as Tony stands up and brings his loot over to the desk. “It’s not that bad. And it’ll make me have to pee.”

“Alright,” Tony puts his hands on his hips. “The stuff from the compound should be here by morning if you need it. And maybe lay off the pretzels.”

“I said they tasted good!”

“Yeah, I heard you. But let’s stick to oatmeal and mashed potatoes tomorrow. What I remember of mono was a real picnic.”

“Well it certainly hasn’t been so far,” Peter’s shoulders unbunch, and he grimaces as he twists to grab the pretzel bin next to him.

“Still achey? Or achey-er?” 

“Um,” Peter lifts the bin, and rotates his upper body and rolls his shoulders. “The same? I think? It’s more that it just takes _so much work_. It sucks.”

“I know, bud,” Tony sighs and walks back over to the bed to take Peter’s bin. “All the more reason it’s bedtime. Let yourself rest. For real. It’s just gonna take longer if you don’t.” He perches on the edge of the mattress. “And while I’m absolutely _devastated_ I won’t be able to spy on you and Michelle tomorrow, it’s probably better you can just slug it all day.”

“I know,” Peter sighs and sniffs. “But it still sucks.”

“I know,” Tony ruffles Peter’s hair, then smooths it back down. “One day at a time.”

“Yeah,” Peter mumbles, then his head bounces back up as if he’s been shocked. “Oh! But look!” He reaches out and presses his hand against Tony’s arm. He waits, expecting to feel the telltale prickle of Peter sticking, but there’s nothing, and Peter’s brows furrow. “Fuck,” he looks back up at Tony and pouts. “I did it before. On the controller. I stuck! I did!”

Tony smiles gently, turning his hand to squeeze Peter’s forearm. “That’s great, Pete.”

“I did! I swear!”

“I believe you, bud,” Tony laughs. “And I’m thrilled--no, don’t give me that look, I am. But all the more reason it’s _time for bed._ Also,” he looks at the clock. “It’s now 12:30, and I’d really like it if your aunt didn’t murder me before my daughter’s birth.”

“I stuck,” Peter grumbles again, but he kicks his feet up and under his duvet with a groan.

“You know, I can’t wait to whip out all the video evidence of you acting like a toddler when you least expect it,” Tony pulls the duvet and sheets up as Peter situates himself on his pillows. “I’m thinking your bachelor party. Maybe during the wedding reception.”

Peter makes a face. “You record in my room?”

“FRIDAY, when you’re sick or injured,” he tucks the duvet over Peter’s shoulders. “I don’t watch unless she alerts me, but I know you tried to drag yourself across the room after that rebar went through your leg.”

“I had to pee.”

“Well, I hope the ripped sutures were worth the dignity of not just asking for help.”

Peter fixes him with a steely glare. “Yes, they were. And you would have done the same thing.”

“Yep, and I have Pepper and Rhodey to yell at me, just like me and your aunt yell at you,” Tony smoothes the duvet over Peter’s arm. “You need your water bottle filled?” 

“No, it’s mostly full,” Peter sniffs and rubs his nose, then looks at Tony out of the corner of his eye. “Mr. Stark, can you ask Dr. Banner to look at my blood again tomorrow? Just to see?”

“See what, kiddo?”

“If those hetero-antibody-thingies are really there? Or the VCR-whatever antibodies?”

“Pete, they will still be there. They’ll probably be there for months. And it’s _VCA_ ”

“Whatever. But, just to like, double-check? Like really make sure?”

Tony sighs, but he squeezes Peter’s shoulder. “We can ask him, if it’ll make you feel better. But they will be. Don’t doubt Bruce.”

“It’s not that I _doubt_ him, Mr. Stark, it’s just…” Peter shrugs. “To be really, really sure.”

“Really, really, really sure,” Tony nods. He’ll indulge him, and himself a little. He hasn’t yet let himself think about how terrifying it was when Peter first arrived at the Tower, or his dream, or the way Peter had sobbed when he’d realized his powers were on the fritz. How bad this really could have been, and how they’d somehow dodged another bullet. This kid really is going to kill him. And soon enough he’ll have _two_ fragile lives to worry about.

Tony will take another positive blood test. Maybe he’ll ask Bruce to do the VCA IgM, even though he said it wasn’t necessary. Just to be really sure. He’ll frame the print out of the results.

“Thanks, Mr. Stark.”

“Anything for you, Spider-baby.”

“Not a baby.”

“Sure,” Tony ruffles his hair again. “Now go to sleep.”

Peter rolls his eyes, then pointedly closes them. “I’m going.”

“Have FRI call if you need anything.”

“I will. ‘Night, Mr. Stark.” 

“‘Night, bud.”

Tony stands, flicking off the TV and lights with a wave of his hands, then grabs the empty milkshake glass from the nightstand. Peter lets out a snore before he even makes it to the bedroom door.

He turns and looks one last time at the small lump in the middle of the bed, the low light from the hall casting shadows on his face and making him look ten years younger than he is. Tony chuckles a bit, at himself and everyone currently in the Tower, and his little roundworm.

 _It really is just a matter of time until he kills me_ , he thinks to himself as he softly clicks the bedroom door shut. “Goddamn mono.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, so here it is. I don't know how I feel about it, but I had a burning desire to finish it so here we are.
> 
> I chose mono because, like most of my previous whump-stories, it is fairly self-limiting and is mostly just annoying, with a super long and weird incubation/infectious period. Unless you rupture your spleen. If you are concerned you have mono, please do not participate in contact spots until you've received clearance from your primary care physician.
> 
> Also this was originally written when the Popeye’s chicken sandwich was out everywhere. Thank god that national crisis is over at least.
> 
> We'll see what happens going forward. Thanks for reading.


End file.
